In short: Im Lauf der Zeit (1976)

aka Kings of the Road (which, frankly, is the better title for the movie at hand, but we Germans always must demonstrate how intellectual we are)

By many, this three hour film that never feels long (and most certainly not too long) is still seen as German director Wim Wenders’s best film. I still have to make my way through the five hour version of Until the Ends of the World, so I can belay that decision. It is certainly one of the best films that came out of the shadow of the German Autorenkino; in part because Wenders was independent-minded enough to take from that particular arthouse style what he needed and could use, discard the rest, and use elements of all those other film styles he loved to make his films his own. Unlike most German directors, Wenders has always been interested in emotions as much as in ideas, not treating them like a kind of abomination that can only end in World War II and pogroms, or as an illness a film has to diagnose. Consequently, this is a film that demands interest in and empathy with its characters, the sort of thing that, or so I’ve heard, is the basis of understanding.

From time to time, you still get a few moments in the dry didactic German style, or some hand-wringing about the state of cinema, or some pretty embarrassing bits of “men talk about the mystery that is The Woman”, but for every second of that, there are scenes and scenes of sensitive insight into (very male-centric versions of, sure) loneliness, the joys of the road, the workings of complicated friendships, and a belief in the powers of quiet compassion that feels deeply held and absolutely convincing. For once in a German movie, the actors – Rüdiger Vogel and Hanns Zischler – don’t even have sticks implanted in their behinds but can actually calmly, relaxedly act and just be.

All of this is filmed in beautiful black and white by Wenders’s usual DOP Robbie Müller, turning the parts of Germany barely anyone ever wants to put into a movie just as fascinating and beautiful – often in surprising ways – as the America of the road movies Wenders so admired (and would soon shoot in). Speaking of which, as someone from and living in the provinces of Lower Saxony, it’s a particular joy to find places I actually know treated this way in the film’s first act, turned strangely beautiful and familiar at the same time. That’s probably not a big thing if you live in New York, LA, Paris, Vancouver, or Bronson Canyon, but if you were born and raised in Wolfsburg, it is quite the thing to see how Wenders treats the old, even uglier version of the city train station (or that Hanns Zischler doesn’t know how to pronounce “Gifhorn”) I remember all too well, or have the characters pop over to a cinema in Helmstedt that’s still standing now. There’s a sense of nostalgia to that, too, but then, unlike what I’ve been told, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that feeling.