Oct. 01--Many of Wim Wenders' films, especially his earlier films from the 1970s, have been out of circulation for decades. No American distributor had access to prints until this past year, when Janus Films acquired the U.S. rights to restorations that "Wenders himself has been working on for several years," said Barbara Scharres, who has programmed a retrospective this month and next at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
"Finally there is a critical mass of new digital restorations, and when that was announced earlier this year I jumped on it right away," she said. The program comprises 11 films from the German director, including the 1999 music documentary "Buena Vista Social Club" (Oct. 16 and 17) as well as 1991's "Until the End of the World" (Nov. 20 and 21), a 295-minute narrative feature that "brings together Wenders' interests in technology and music and road movies into this gigantic work that's never been shown in the U.S. in its full-length version," Scharres said. (The nearly five-hour film will be screened with just one 15-minute intermission.)
What caught my eye are Wenders' earlier films, in particular 1974's "Alice in the Cities" (screening Friday and Saturday). Shot on black-and-white 16 mm film, it winds its way from coastal North Carolina up to New York City, across the ocean to Amsterdam and on to various regions in Germany, following a 31-year-old, almost comically disaffected German magazine writer (Philip, played by a rangy and rumpled Rudiger Vogler), armed with his ever-present Polaroid camera.
He has found no charms on this shambling road trip, driving down roads with American pop music blaring out of "that vulgar radio, and every night in a motel that looks just like all the others before," where he sits and watches "that barbarous television." Barbarous!
He blows his deadline and makes plans to leave New York and fly back home. At the airport, he meets a single mother (also from Germany) and her 9-year-old daughter, Alice (a perfectly deadpan Yella Rottlander). Somehow, Philip becomes Alice's semi-permanent baby sitter/guardian/chaperon/whatever when her mother just takes off. Gone.
And so the pair essentially shrug and fly back to Europe, where Philip rents a Renault and drives Alice around various German towns in search of her grandmother's house, a snapshot of which she keeps in her wallet. Alice can neither remember the address nor the city, or even her grandmother's name. In an era that predates the Internet and smartphones, this is an insurmountable problem.
It's such an odd turn of events, this pair thrown together without anyone raising an eyebrow (viewed with 21st-century sensibilities, it's all you can do to keep your eyebrows from flying off your head), but you sense nothing predatory about Philip. Neither he nor Alice seems especially perturbed by the disappearance of her mother. Inconvenienced, yes. And Alice isn't completely without moments of real distress. But mostly she seems unfazed. You sense that she has bounced around a lot; this is nothing new.
Part of the film's appeal is how it captures the look and technology of the era: At the airport, Alice slumps into one of those chairs with a small coin-operated TV mounted on it. There's a terrific sense of visual whiplash as the film shifts from its early, sun-bleached scenes at the beach to the urbane streets of Manhattan to the Old World look of Wuppertal (located in then-West Germany). Extended shots of Wuppertal's overhead rail system, with its suspended gondolas, look like an inverted image of Chicago's own elevated train system.
Wenders himself has a deep fascination with technology, and that shows up here in the form of the Polaroid camera. It is in constant use throughout the film; the model Philip carries is a superb piece of design, folding sleek and flat when not in use.
"I know that Wenders had a deal with Polaroid to help finance the film," Scharres said. "It was almost product placement. I guess they gave him some money for this, and part of the deal was that he had to depict all the stages of taking and developing a Polaroid photo. So you have that sequence in the beginning" -- at the beach, which has a wonderfully sordid, almost Pynchon-esque look to it -- "when Philip is taking pictures and lining them up under the pier where he's sitting. I think it's a very cool sequence, but at the same time the behind-the-scenes information is that Wenders was committed to doing that as part of this Polaroid sponsorship deal."
Scharres herself worked with Wenders briefly in the early '80s: "From some encounters I've had with him over the years, including a couple days I spent helping him look for locations for (1984's) 'Paris, Texas' near Houston, I got to know him a little bit, and he's like the original multitasker."
At one point during their scouting trip, they stopped at a roadside bar: "All the cars in the parking lot were pickup trucks with gun racks in the back, and we drive in with Wenders' rental car -- the only one they had left when he got to the airport was a white Cadillac -- and Wim says, 'I think we have the wrong car to come to this place!' So we go in and he's really into it and he sets up his camera on the edge of the table and he's trying to surreptitiously take pictures of the locals at this bar, but it's this big, hulking Leica. And finally some guy at a table goes, 'Hey, I know you're taking my picture,' and we were like, 'Oh, no!' but he invited us over to his table.
"But Wim gravitates to these kinds of situations, and he's always in this serious, research-gathering mode. This is all feeding into his ideas; he's not just sitting there having a drink and having fun, he's doing research."
"Alice in the Cities" screens at 6 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Saturday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. The cinema's Wim Wenders retrospective continues through November. Go to www.siskelfilmcenter.org/wenders.
nmetz@tribpub.com
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