In black/white, widescreen 1:1,66, original soundtrack, shot in 11 weeks, between July 1st and October 31st, 1975, between Lüneburg and Hof, along the frontier with East Germany.” So begins this multi-layered and marvellously meandering movie which carries you effortlessly across three hours of beautiful cinema.
Its main characters are two men. The dungareed Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, familiar from Alice in the Cities), spends his time mending and maintaining projection equipment in small town picture houses. He lives in his truck and has learned to live with loneliness, turning a ready smile into a mask. One fine morning as he is shaving he watches a man speed by in his Beetle – right to the end of the road and on into the Elbe. He’s gained a travelling companion. Sometime during that day, or maybe the next – exact chronology isn’t so important here – they introduce themselves to each other and Bruno goes about his business, with Robert in tow.
Kings of the Road (or In the Course of Time in its original German title) works on a number of levels. It’s a film about male friendship, loneliness and its consolations, but it’s also a reflection on the state of cinema in Germany and the influence of American culture on the European imagination. And it’s also, of course, a road movie (in a MAN removals truck), beautifully photographed in silvery monochrome by Robbie Müller and Martin Schäfer, who make sublime visual poetry of the dusk.
In an essay Wenders wrote about Robert Altman’s film Nashville in 1976, the year after he made Kings of the Road, he bemoaned the fact that there was little serious film criticism being written in Germany. Maybe that is why his film seems such a fresh statement of intent. Nothwithstanding that it is a leisurely road movie, there’s an attitude here, an excitement of stating principles and marking out territory for a new way of making movies, of finding a way to meld European sensibilities with American film language. At the end of his essay Wenders wrote, ‘I feel at ease and open and I am delighted at everything I see’. I felt the same way after watching this film. It leaves you in a good place.
This multi-layered and marvellously meandering film works on a number of levels. Taking the situation of a man who spends his time delivering film reels to out of the way cinemas in Germany, and who hooks up with a similarly drifting travelling companion for a while, it's a reflection on the state of cinema in Germany and how the European imagination has been influenced by American culture. As much as this though, it's also a film about male friendship, loneliness and its consolations. It's also, of course, a road movie and is a beautiful way to spend three hours!
