Capturing zeitgeist of 70s Germany
The Goethe Institut, which supports German culture in New Zealand, has supplied Nelson Film Society with two films for this season.
Both are by one of their most famous film directors – Wim Wenders. The first to screen here is actually the second of a pair he made that deal indirectly with what is known as ‘‘writer’s block’’ – a term which describes the difficult situation many authors find themselves in when their creative ideas dry up and they are unable to proceed.
As it happens Wrong Move is actually based on a story written by another famous German – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (after whom the Goethe Institut is named).
Goethe’s novel was written in the late eighteenth century but Wenders has transferred his story to German society in the 1970s. The original tale involved travel undertaken by romantics 200 years before so Wenders switches it to the road movie genre favoured by cinema of his time.
Wilhelm, the central character, travels from his hometown on the Elbe river all the way to Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze, where it ends with a slow fade into the mist.
On the way Wilhelm meets many people including a very young Nastassja Kinski at the train’s first stop, in Hamburg. However, it is the German actors Ru¨diger Vogler as Wilhelm; Lisa Kreuzer as his girlfriend and Hanna Schygulla as a beautiful actress who carry the weight as major characters.
At first critics complained that the film was too heavily dependent on dialogue – that it was too wordy – but as time has gone by critics like Chris Petit of the Guardian and Richard Brody of the New Yorker have come to consider it one of Wender’s best films ‘‘a virtual documentary of West German sights and moods’’.
This is the big achievement – to take a novel that was steeped in eighteenth century romanticism and adapt it to reflect the troubled German mood (zeitgeist) of the 1970s.