Kings of the Road

press release:

KINGS OF THE ROAD (IM LAUF DER ZEIT)

West Germany | 1976 | DCP | 176 min. | German with English subtitles

Director: Wim Wenders; Cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Lisa Kreuzer

A traveling film projector repairman (Vogler) meets up with a suicidal pediatrician (Zischler) and together they travel the German countryside, bonding over their shared ennui while stopping along the way at every local movie theater on the repairman’s route. Touching on themes of national identity, post-war uncertainty, and loneliness, Kings is primarily a love letter to cinema and cinematic exhibition. That love is expressed with a seemingly endless cavalcade of strikingly beautiful black and white tableaus courtesy of Wenders’ longtime partner, cinematographer Robby Müller.

Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders completes the triumvirate of internationally acclaimed filmmakers that emerged in the New German Cinema movement of the 1970s. The titles selected for this retrospective series represent Wenders’ very best movies from the 70s and 80s. Many of the selections reveal Wenders’ particular talent in finding new kinds of “road movies” that feature his protagonists traveling through multiple cities and sometimes across continents.