Where Wim Wenders Went Wrong
The retrospective of films by Wim Wenders currently running at IFC Center offers a chance to observe an unusual cinematic phenomenon. Wenders’s career is marked by a break that occurred between 1975 and 1977, between the films “Kings of the Road” and “The American Friend.” Both are road movies (the German title of the earlier film, “Im Lauf der Zeit,” means “in the course of time”), but the earlier film inhabits its moment and its place fully, while the later one is petrified in cinematic nostalgia and deploys its picturesque landscapes and cityscapes as mere signifiers of travel. In that shift, Wenders went from being one of the most intrepid and original directors of the time to being himself an art-house signifier.