Wim Wenders

Wim Wenders (1945- ), German director of films exploring aspects of American and European cultures. Born Wilhelm Wenders in Düsseldorf, Wenders studied at a film school in Munich from 1967 to 1970, where he made several short films and his first feature, Summer in the City (Dedicated to the Kinks) in 1970. His first commercial film was Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1972; The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty).

Wenders has explored his interest in American culture in such films as Alice in den Städten (1974; Alice in the Cities), in which a German girl searches for her grandmother in the United States, then in Germany; Der Amerikanische Freund (1977; The American Friend), a thriller featuring the American directors Dennis Hopper, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray; and Paris, Texas (1984), from a screenplay by Sam Shepard, in which an American drifter (Harry Dean Stanton) searches for his estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski). Subsequently, Wenders returned to exploring contemporary Germany and the state of the world. In Der Himmel über Berlin (1987; Wings of Desire), scripted by Wenders and Peter Handke, angels observing the then-divided German capital are tempted to become human; Until the End of the World (1991) is a science-fiction epic set in several countries; and Weiter Ferne, So Nah (1993; Faraway, So Close) concerns the angels of Berlin after German reunification.

In 1995 Wenders’s film company, Road Movies, produced the first Michelangelo Antonioni film in over 20 years, Par-delà les Nuages (Beyond the Clouds). The two directors worked together on the script, and Wenders directed its prologue and epilogue. Before directing two films on the beginnings of German Cinema—Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995; A Trick of the Light) and Lumière de Berlin (1995)—Wenders made Lisbon Story (1994), about a film sound engineer who starts work on material filmed by a director who has mysteriously disappeared. The End of Violence (1997) explores the responsibilities of film-makers for actions arising out of the violence in their films; Buena Vista Social Club, a documentary about a group of legendary Cuban musicians (see Buena Vista Social Club), was nominated for an Academy Award; in The Million Dollar Hotel (2000), scripted by U2 singer Bono, a federal agent (Mel Gibson) investigates the mysterious death of a billionaire’s son; in Don't Come Knocking (2005), written by and starring Sam Shepard, an actor goes absent from a film shoot and returns to his home town to discover the consequences of his actions 20 years earlier.