DVD & Blu-ray
Alice In The Cities, British music videos
There is no wonderland in Alice In The Cities. This bleakly haunting road movie – the first of a trilogy by Wim Wenders, and a precursor to his later masterpiece, Paris, Texas – is a forensic study of alienation, of being lost, of being in the wrong place in the wrong time. It is also extraordinarily beautiful, thanks to the black and white cinematography of Robby Müller (later to do great work with Jim Jarmusch).
It is, by today’s standards, an implausible story. It features Rüdiger Vogler as Wenders’ alter ego, Philip Winter, a German journalist suffering from writer’s block in the USA. Commissioned to travel around America, he resorts instead to taking Polaroid pictures (Wenders was gifted an early prototype of the instant film camera).“When you drive through the American landscape,” Winter explains, “something happens to you. The images you see change you.”
The story unfurls with a minimum of fuss. Events conspire against Winter. He can’t get home to Germany because of a flight controllers’ strike, so he finds himself falling into the orbit of another disjointed traveller, Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer) and her daughter, Alice (Yella Rottländer). They drift around New York, Winter visits an old girlfriend, and ultimately finds himself travelling back to Amsterdam with the girl, staying in an airport hotel, and them embarking on a trip to try and find her grandparents.
The journey is an anxiety dream. Looking from the plane window as Winter photographs the clouds, Alice tells him. “It’s a nice picture. It’s so empty.” Later, in Amsterdam, the girl chides Winter about his shortcomings as a tourist. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she says. “I don’t want to see anything,” he replies. Later still, while Winter has a bath, he confesses to Alice that he is afraid of fear. “Angst, angst,” she replies, mockingly.
Today, with the bureaucratic complications of air travel, the journey seems absurd, to say nothing of the opprobrium which might rain down on a mature man taking a young girl, a stranger, abroad. There are moments where the intimacy between the adult and the child feels awkward. But even as Wenders was making the film, it wasn’t a realistic proposition. The revolving door in which Winters first encounters Alice is the rabbit hole which leads him away from the void.
Time has changed the meaning of what Wenders saw, of course. Those bleak vistas – the muscle cars, the motels, the water tower, the jukebox diners – are now the stuff of nostalgia. Wenders was certainly alert to the difficulties of visiting a fantasy. The film itself was inspired by Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee”, and Wenders’ realisation that the lyric was about a father who was missing his daughter, and not a girlfriend. One of the few moments of contentment the director allows Winter comes when he slopes away to watch Berry perform. (He drinks a Coca-Cola just to underline the point).
There is a German aspect to the tale, too, of course. For Wenders’ generation, German identity was suffused with guilt, so the film marks some kind of homecoming, and a restatement of the validity of the director’s own experience. For non-Germans, that aspect may seem esoteric. In any case, it’s the disgust which lingers, though Winter’s visceral reaction to America, to its “vulgar radio” and “barbarous television”, is flecked with ambivalence. The ending has Winter reading the obituary of John Ford, the filmmaker who invented the fantasy of the American west; one of the few things Winter writes is how television turns everything into “ads for the status quo”.
As you’d expect in a movie about imagery, the script is sparse, but there is one scene in which Wenders spells things out. “I got completely lost,” Winter says. “It was a horrible journey. Once you leave New York City nothing changes anymore. It all looks the same. You can’t imagine anything anymore. Above all you can’t imagine any change. I became estranged from myself. All I could imagine was going on and on like this forever.” As a speech, it has some of power of the scene in Paris,
Texas were the mute Travis talks. It feels like a moment of dramatic transformation. For Wenders, getting lost is a way finding the road home.
Extras: 6/10. Wenders interview by Mark Cousins, conversations with Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer, short on Wenders’ Polaroids, deleted scenes, short on Wenders’ films, booklet with intro by Walter Salles.