Alice in the Cities (1974)

All of Wim Wenders' preoccupations were already on display in his early masterpiece "Alice in the Cities"; the road, travel, America, (and American music), alienation, angst. The 'story' is simplicity itself; a German photo-journalist, on an assignment in America, and one which he fails to complete, finds himself saddled with 9 year old Alice after meeting her and her mother as they try to book tickets back to Germany. When the mother abandons the child with him he seems to readily accept the responsibility of looking after her. He is something of a lost soul and in the child, Alice, perhaps he sees a mirror image of himself.

Today the premiss may seem somewhat unlikely yet it fits perfectly into Wenders' skewed vision of the world. He shot in monochrome, (Robby Muller was again DoP), giving it the feel of a documentary and as our hero, Rudiger Vogler is superbly naturalistic as is Yella Rottlander as Alice. They make a great, unsentimental team; the film may owe a debt to American cinema but it's without any of the sickly sentimentality you usually find in American films dealing with 'lost' children. Indeed, everything that happens seems remarkably matter-of-fact but this is a picture of life, not as it's lived, but as Wenders imagines it should be lived; it's both abstract and humanist and it remains one of the finest of all German films.

Fmovies: Besides the acclaimed and popular later works like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), Wim Wenders is also known for his Road Movie Trilogy, a string of three films that came out in consecutive years in the 1970s. Alice in the Cities, the first movie in the trilogy, was released in 1974, while the other two are The Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976).

Alice in the Cities marks the first appearance of the director's recurring character Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) who would later reappear in several other Wenders titles. This time he is a journalist and photographer who has been assigned to travel around in the United States and write a story about his experiences but suffers from a bad case of writer's block. Just before returning to his native Germany he meets a German woman called Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer) and her young daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer) who are also planning to return home. Soon Philip finds himself as Alice's temporary custodian and takes her on a long road trip through Germany in order to find her grandmother whose whereabouts seem to be more or less unknown.

Many stories have been made about men learning something new about themselves upon suddenly becoming responsible for a child. The premise can easily be made into a cheesy inspirational family movie, but luckily Alice in the Cities takes a more ambitious, or perhaps ambiguous, route. There are only three significant characters in the story: Philip appears to enjoy living and working alone but gets fairly well along with the young Alice who has also been thrown into the situation against her will but is able to maintain a positive attitude most of the time. The third important figure in the film is Alice's mother Lisa who remains rather enigmatic and does not reveal much about her motives. Philip and Alice do quietly evolve as persons over the course of the story; how exactly, the audience must figure out by themselves.

Visually the movie looks fine. The grainy black and white cinematography is guaranteed Robby Müller quality and the melancholic score is provided by the legendary German krautrock band Can. Numerous shots are filmed through car windows as Philip drives through American or German towns by himself or with Alice, so admirers of urban environments can get a neat first-hand view of a traveler. I especially liked the scenes on or near the suspended monorail in Wuppertal, Germany. Loud TV programs playing in various television sets are also a recurring theme and a source of frustration for Philip, whereas Alice seems to enjoy them more.

There are some things I'm not sure I like, such as the slightly excessive runtime or the frequent fades to black that make many scenes feel a tad rushed, but in the end I enjoyed the movie as a whole. Rüdiger Vogler does a good job as the quiet Philip and Yella Rottländer never comes across as unnatural or annoying in the role of Alice. Alienation, parenthood and traveling are themes that have wide appeal and whilst "the journey is more important than the destination" may not be a wildly original conclusion, it always makes a fitting overhanging theme for a road movie. In addition, Alice in the Cities features a strong thematic connection to Paris, Texas and is recommended viewing to fans of said movie and traveling films in general.

The references between Wenders' films and cinema in general are utterly diverse. They reach from direct hints and citations to more subliminal connections. And therefore, mainly the early films of De Sica resonate in Alice in the Cities, especially the neo-realistic masterpiece Ladri di biciclette. In the main protagonists' (journalist Philip and young girl Alice) search for her grandmother in the German Ruhrpott, we can see traces of the father's and his son's search for the bicycle in Rome. Both films are open for sidelong glances, for moments that don't want to give in the dramaturgic concept of the story. But, actually, you don't have to watch De Sica's film to lose yourself in the sheer beauty and poetry of Alice in the Cities, where documentary elements win over fiction and found pictures triumph over staged ones; when shots of moments fall out of the stream of images and reveal an almost boundless yearning.

Alice in the Cities fmovies. http://eattheblinds.blogspot.com/

Between the years 1971 and 1977, Wim Wenders could do no wrong. Yet, even with his best films already on the screen, mainstream success eluded him until 1984, when his over- romanticized Paris, Texas (a fanboy-esquire ode to John Ford and the American landscape) established him as one of Cannes' most beloved filmmakers. Perhaps as a result of commercial success coming from his sappiest work to date, Wenders' chased a tangent that spiraled into career insignificance after 1993's Faraway, So Close! By the mid-late 90's, Wenders' films (documentaries excluded) became achingly pretentious and ripe for parody.

Back in his prime, 1974's Alice in the Cities / Alice in den Städten foreshadowed the near perfection to come in 1976's Kings of the Road / Im Lauf der Zeit. Overshadowed by KOTR, AITC has been overlooked, yet despite its smaller scale, budget and running time, it addresses many of the same themes common to Wenders' best films. The most prevalent of these recurring themes is: der angst (translated: Fear). All of Wenders characters are driven by a fate defined by either Kierkegaard and/or Heidegger's notion of what fear is. Wenders' Angst is the German equivalent of what Existentialism was to the French New Wave, powerful philosophical themes that would ultimately shape the direction of their respective cinematic movements.

If asked to recommend a series of films every fan of cinema should see, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest the films Wenders made between 71-77 (in addition to 1982's The State of Things / Der Stand der Dinge). In my mind these films are meditative, visually hypnotic and poignant essays that speak volumes on the human condition and of film-making itself. These films have inspired me tremendously and if you're a fan of Jim Jarmusch, discovering these films will feel like uncovering a hidden cache of his films. Jarmusch owes a great debt to Wenders both as an inspiration but also as a donor, since it was the short ends from State of Things that enabled Jarmusch to make his exceptional second feature Stranger Than Paradise. If you haven't already seen these films, make the effort...you will be happy you did: The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick /Alice in the Cities / Wrong Move / Kings of the Road / The American Friend.

pay attention to the sounds in this film. philip cannot stand the sound of america--the tv, the radio, the noise of the city. upon arrival in europe he falls asleep to the soothing noise of classical music.

my favorite statement, which i take to be about the age old notion of "paradis amerika," is when alice and philip play hangman in the plane. The word used is traum. alice says only things that really exist can be used as words for this game. paradis amerika cannot kill you, because it doesn't exist.

a wonderful film.

i give it three riders of the apocalypse.

I have just seen this wonderful film by Wim Wenders again after many years, and it has all the charm that I remembered. It is about the friendship between a grown man and a little girl aged eleven (whose mother has 'dumped' her on him). These days, no one would dare to make such a film because children and grown-ups no longer have friendships. This film may well have been inspired by the earlier 'Sundays and Cybele' (1962), a brilliant film on the same theme by the talented French director Serge Bourgoignon, who has mysteriously not made a film since 1969, despite winning the 1963 Oscar for Best Foreign Film with 'Cybele'. Imagine an Oscar being given today to a film about such a taboo subject! Children are now locked up in the house by their neurotic mothers and not allowed to play on their lawns, they are just as tightly under siege from the danger of adults as we all are in the process of being from the danger of 'terrorism'. In fact, the present consensus is that all adults are terrorists from the child's point of view. Best never to meet any! Professor Neil Postman, a brilliant social psychologist and cultural critic whom I knew slightly (he died in 2003) analysed what is going on as long ago as 1982 when he brought out his shocking book 'The Disappearance of Childhood'. In it, he pointed out that the concept of 'childhood' as we have traditionally known it until recent years was a creation of the Renaissance, and that prior to that, children were just little people who had not yet learned very much. If one reads Postman's book carefully, and considers what is really going on at the deepest psychological levels today, the powerful guilt feelings which adults now have are clearly the motive force behind the psychopathic mania now raging in the English-speaking world about paedophilia. Add to this the false memory syndrome where unscrupulous 'therapists' are convincing huge numbers of women and girls that they have been raped as children, usually by their fathers (when they haven't), and you have a real mixture! Of course, any logical outside observer of human society would point out that we now live in a society which perversely and insistently attempts to sexualise children. Fortunes are made by greedy corporations in marketing sexually suggestive clothes and even pole-dancing kits (!!) to little girls. The role models of these little girls are allowed by their idiot parents to be pop singers who are sex-addicts, cocaine-addicts, everything a little girl should NOT want to become. The media are the evil collaborators in this sexualisation of children because it sells ads, and also because many media folk are frankly extremely perverted. All of this means that films like this one by Wim Wenders are now of archaeological interest, bearing witness to a past civilisation, before little girls were encouraged to dress and behave in public like mini-prostitutes and jiggle up and down with their 'pole-dancing kits', or to think that the word 'sexy is the highest form of praise that exists for a child. Yes, childhood has largely disappeared, and it will probably never return. But then, with childhood went sensible parenthood as well, and the Collapse of Western Civilisation is nowhere more conclusively demonstrated than by the vanishing of those two institutions.