Wim Wenders: The Long Look Across Empty Country
In October 1966 a 21-year-old German medical school dropout moved to Paris intending to become a painter, sat the entrance examination for IDHEC, the French national film school, and failed it. He took a job as an engraver in Johnny Friedlaender's studio in Montparnasse and consoled himself by watching as many as five films a day in the city's cinematheques. Eighteen years later, that reject won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
A Surgeon's Son
Wilhelm Ernst Wenders was born in Dusseldorf on 14 August 1945, three months after the end of the war in Europe, into a traditionally Catholic family; his father Heinrich was a surgeon. As a boy he made unaccompanied trips to Amsterdam to look at the Rijksmuseum, an early and unusually deliberate education of the eye. He finished school in Oberhausen in the Ruhr.
What followed was a search rather than a plan. He studied medicine at the University of Freiburg from 1963 to 1964, philosophy at the University of Dusseldorf from 1964 to 1965, then went to Paris to paint. After the IDHEC rejection he returned to Germany in 1967 and entered the University of Television and Film in Munich, where he studied until 1970 and where his real training happened.
The Road Movies
His feature debut, Summer in the City, came in 1970, as the New German Cinema was forming around a generation determined to make films that had nothing to do with the country's recent past. Wenders's contribution was a trilogy made between 1974 and 1976, Alice in the Cities, The Wrong Move and Kings of the Road, which established the register he has worked in ever since: characters in transit, long takes, a camera more interested in the space around a person than in the plot they are supposedly serving. The American Friend in 1977, a neo-noir with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, took him into genre and into the American film culture he had absorbed in Paris.
Paris, Texas
The 1984 film, with Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski and Dean Stockwell, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the BAFTA for Best Direction. It also grew directly out of his photographic practice: while preparing it he shot the series Written in the West, the first instalment of a project he called Pictures from the Surface of the Earth, in which the emphasis fell on desolate landscape. Anyone who has seen the film understands the connection; its power is less in what the characters say than in the emptiness they are placed against.
Wings of Desire
Three years later came the film most people mean when they say his name. Wings of Desire, made in 1987 with Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk, took the Best Director award at Cannes and turned a divided Berlin into a metaphysical proposition. He returned to its world in 1993 with Faraway, So Close!, which won the Cannes Grand Prix, and had in between attempted his most ambitious fiction, the sprawling science-fiction drama Until the End of the World in 1991.
The Second Career
From 1999 he became, almost inadvertently, one of the world's most decorated documentary filmmakers. Buena Vista Social Club brought elderly Cuban musicians to a global audience and earned an Academy Award nomination. Pina, his 3D film about the choreographer Pina Bausch, followed in 2011 with a second nomination, and The Salt of the Earth in 2014 brought a third. In 2012 he declared that he would work only in 3D from then on, a commitment few directors of his standing have made, and in 2023 he released both Perfect Days and Anselm, a 3D documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer. He was president of the European Film Academy from 1996 to 2020. Speaking to The New York Times about his 2025 film The Keys to Freedom, he warned that "young people take freedom for granted, not realizing they may soon need to defend it."
Why Wim Is Called a Genius
The faculty in question is pictorial rather than literary, and it is unusually well documented in his case because he has pursued it in two mediums at once. Wenders composes moving images the way a landscape photographer composes still ones, and his still photography, the Pictures from the Surface of the Earth project begun in the early 1980s, is not a hobby running alongside the films but the same activity in a different form. The consequence is a body of work in which meaning is carried by duration and space rather than by dialogue: the American desert of Paris, Texas, the divided city of Wings of Desire, the empty roads of the trilogy. Very few directors trust an image to do that much work. The formal restlessness is the other half of the case, and it is genuine. A man who has won the Palme d'Or does not need to gamble on 3D at sixty-six, and Pina used the technology to solve a problem, the depth of a dancer's movement on a flat screen, rather than to sell tickets.
The honest counter-case has two parts. First, the record does not show critics reaching for the word genius; his reputation rests on an intense stretch of acclaim from roughly 1974 to 1987 and a later documentary career, and his three Academy Award nominations are all for documentaries, none for the fiction films on which his artistic standing was built. Second, his judgement outside the frame has been questioned: in 2009 he signed a petition supporting Roman Polanski during his detention over 1977 sexual abuse charges, arguing that the arrest undermined film festivals as places where work could be shown freely and safely, a defence that placed the interests of cinema above those of a victim. Formal brilliance is not moral authority, and the distinction matters.
Legacy
Wenders holds an Honorary Golden Bear from 2015, a Golden Lion and an Honorary Golden Lion, and honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne in 1989, Fribourg in 1995 and Louvain in 2005. He lives and works in Berlin with his wife Donata, whom he married in 1993. His larger contribution is a grammar: he demonstrated that a film could be built out of looking rather than telling, and made a generation of directors comfortable with the idea that the landscape is a character. Fifty-five years after a French film school told him he was not suitable, the argument looks settled.
