‘Night Watch’ (2004/6)
Back in the early ’90’s international cinema seemed on the verge of a breakthrough, primarily credited to the efforts of one director– Wim Wenders.
While Wenders was officially part of the New Wave of German Cinema that washed up on American shores between 1969 and 1982, he was something of a movement within himself. While many German filmmakers of the time – Volker Schlöndorff, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, etc. – made small, independent pictures that dealt with a post-War German identity that was split by the Cold War. Many of these films deal with broken marriages, broken households (Fassbinder) and broken notions of German Romanticism (Herzog).
Though Wenders started that way, he somehow found a more compelling and consistent subject in an evolving Europe. Despite borders and ideologies Wenders saw common ground between the then East- and the Western Europe and part of that was about music. ‘Kings of the Road’ (1976) is a road-movie that takes place alongside the East German border with a sountrack that’s more American Country-Western than Politburo. [Read more →]