Back to where he once belonged...Wim Wenders. Photograph: Jennifer Graylock/AP
Wim Wenders was ubiquitous at this year's Thessaloniki Film Festival.
Not only did the 61-year-old director introduce a comprehensive retrospective of his films from The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick to Don't Come Knocking, but he gave two master classes, two press conferences and there was an exhibition of his photographs, mostly taken on the sets of his movies over the years.
In addition, there was his bespectacled face peering from posters everywhere. Although on the posters Wenders was seen with short, neatly cut hair, in reality he appeared with long, silver-streaked shoulder-length hair in 1960s style. For Wenders is a man of the 1960s, influenced by the music and ideology of that epoch, who made his best films from the early '70s to the mid-80s. The retrospective gave one the chance to consider his career up to the present, and ponder on why his films since, perhaps, 1987's Wings of Desire have been so disappointing.
Wenders claims that he has as much enthusiasm as ever for his profession, but that the privilege of making films has disappeared in these digital days when anybody can make a movie. When he, Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder started as film directors in the late 1960s, they redefined German cinema.
Wenders was more aware than most contemporary German directors of the American cultural influence on European cinema and his films reflected this. His isolated, emotionally-stunted characters are re-sensitised by pop music and by hitting the road. These leisurely odysseys reached their apotheosis in Paris, Texas, his greatest international success.
His latest film, Don't Come Knocking, was a rather strained attempt to return to the theme of the earlier movie, while Faraway, So Close was a silly sequel to the whimsical Wings of Desire, an angel's eye view of Berlin. The director's cut of Until The End of the World was shown in Thessaloniki in all its muddled and pretentious 278 minutes. The End of Violence was a neo-noir mess, and it is difficult to disagree with Mel Gibson, the star of The Million Dollar Hotel, that it was "as boring as a dog's ass". Land of Plenty was a weak effort to find sympathy for a despicable character and ended up being an unconvincing paean of praise to post 9/11 America.
Today Wenders has become disillusioned with America, the country of his dreams. "The American Dream is strictly an invention of American cinema," he explained. In other words, Wenders youthful infatuation with the States, which lasted 50 years, has ended. "I have returned to my European roots. I've accepted myself as German." As a character in Fritz Lang's Clash By Night says: "Home is where you get when you run out of places." We can only hope that his next film to be made in his homeland with an all-German cast will silence those who suspect that his bright future is now behind him.
