#501: WENDERS, Wim: Paris, Texas (1984)
WENDERS, Wim (Germany)
Paris, Texas [1984]
Spine #501
Blu-ray
Blu-ray
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in Paris, Texas, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
145 minutes
Color
Color
Surround
1:78:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2009
Director/Writers
Written by Sam Shepard.
Adaptation by L. M. Kit Carson.
Wim Wenders was 39 when he directed Paris, Texas.
Other Wenders films in the Collection:
#814: Alice In The Cities (1974)
#815: Wrong Move (1975)
#816: Kings Of The Road (1976)
#793: The American Friend (1977)
#490: Wings Of Desire (1987)
#1007: Until The End Of The World (1991)
#866: Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
#644: Pina (2011)
The Film
Other Wenders films in the Collection:
#814: Alice In The Cities (1974)
#815: Wrong Move (1975)
#816: Kings Of The Road (1976)
#793: The American Friend (1977)
#490: Wings Of Desire (1987)
#1007: Until The End Of The World (1991)
#866: Buena Vista Social Club (1999)
#644: Pina (2011)
The Film
As the red-on-black PARIS, TEXAS credit disappears, the first cut of the film is astonishing — an aerial shot of the landscape of Big Bend National Park:
Robby Müller’s camera (some of his best work) soon finds Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) — a tiny ant-like figure walking through the desolate landscape.
We’re a little worried about poor Travis at this point. He takes his last sip of water from a jug, and keeps walking. Soon, he’s made it to Terlingua …
[today a touristy “ghost town”]
where he enters a bar, eats some ice and collapses. Soon Dr. Ulmer (the brilliant Bernhard Wicki) is poking and probing the catatonic Travis.
Meanwhile, Ry Cooder’s brilliant score is based on Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark was the Night. (Cooder recording his own version on his first album, from 1970.)
Here’s a cool article on bottleneck guitar slides.
**
Wenders shot the film in chronological order, with only half a script. After working closely with Shepard, their schedules diverged by the time the shoot started. Panicked, Wenders put an outline in the mail to Sam for some ideas for the rest of the movie, and Shepard sent back pages of brilliant dialogue.
Walt (Dean Stockwell) has to carry the first few scenes by himself, as Travis still isn’t talking. His wife, Anne (Aurore Clément) is French, of course … Paris is in the title, after all — but Wenders also was using her because the production was co-French and German, and the producers insisted on using their countries’ talent …
Hunter (Hunter Carson) — eight-years-old — steals the film. He is magnificent, and an adept improviser, too. When Wenders discovered his love of space, he let him go off — and we thus have such scenes as the kid telling Travis about the Big Bang theory, and — through the walkie-talkies the kid insisted on getting for the trip — the three seconds it would take to get from L.A. to Houston in “light time.”
Jane (Nastassja Kinski) doesn’t appear until the second half — and then in a home movie, shown to Travis by Walt and Anne to try to jog his memory. Jane does a twirl in the film-within-a-film that strongly reverberates in the final scene …
**
Altogether, a wonderful, touching adventurous travelogue-cum-extended family drama, Paris, Texas is a miracle of 80s filmmaking that will stand up forever as a fine piece of cinema.
Film Rating (0-60):
The Booklet
Forty-five page booklet featuring an essay by film critic Nick Roddick, interviews with Stanton, writer Shepard, and actors Kinski and Stockwell, and excerpts from Wenders’ book of photos Written in the West.
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The ExtrasThe Booklet
Forty-five page booklet featuring an essay by film critic Nick Roddick, interviews with Stanton, writer Shepard, and actors Kinski and Stockwell, and excerpts from Wenders’ book of photos Written in the West.
Roddick:
“If Paris, Texas is a love letter to America and American cinema, it now also has something of the feel of a farewell. The world to which Wenders pays homage is vanishing fast: not the desert, which is close to eternal, but the pay phones and diners and motels that used to line the approach to every small U.S. town, now replaced by cell phones and McDonald’s and multistory Doubletree Hotels and Quality Inns. All offer a sterile, branded comfort — and all deny the lure of the road, the impulse to keep moving, by affirming that, nowadays, however far you go, it’s still going to look just like home.”
Shepard, on the ending:
“For me, it comes out of this realization that even patching up something that was broken isn’t enough. The real thing that’s broken is in him. And in order to fulfill that, in order to see what the nature of that is, he has to see it alone. And by patching everything up and staying with that, in a way he’s just going to re-create the same thing that was there before. Even pulling together the broken pieces of his past isn’t enough; what has finally to come about is to bring together the broken pieces in himself. And he has to do it alone …”
Kinski:
“I wrote a whole diary about what happened to Jane before. I just think she was a young girl, maybe coming from Europe, and when you meet someone, everything seems possible, crazy things happen that you never think could happen, and you just start to live. She met this man who made her laugh, and there was no wait, no demand or questions, no why or how. And somehow, for him, she was this young person who gave life to his world, and for her, he was this one person who gave her love and light. As soon as they have the baby, he starts to change. When a man needs someone, he tries so much to hold on to that, not to let it go, that his love becomes strange and overpowering. Love can be very threatening, suffocating; you can’t breathe anymore …”
Stanton:
“I was very intrigued with the fact that Sam’s first description of Travis was as a guy who doesn’t talk. I like the type: he didn’t talk, period. Forget motivating — the “Why doesn’t he talk?” is beside the point, in a way. He just doesn’t want to talk. Everybody talks too much.”
Stockwell (on trying to get Hunter Carson prepared):
“I told him there were going to be a lot of times when he would hear one phrase over and over again, which is ‘Oh, that was great. One more time.’ I remember that used to drive me nuts when I was a kid. So I tried to prepare him for a few things I knew he was going to find difficult. And he did. Very soon, he hated hearing, ‘Just one more time. One more time and you can go on playing.’”
Wenders (on still photography):
“Photography enables you to grasp a place first time round. In fact, photography often tends to become impossible in a place you’re already familiar with. Going back somewhere seldom accompanies a desire to take photos. For me, the familiarity of things, knowing them, almost rules out photography. It is a means of exploration; it’s a vital part of travel, almost as essential as a car or a plane. The photo camera makes arrival in a place possible.”
Commentary
Wenders.
His commentaries are always a treat. Here, he speaks honestly about his troubles (making half a film with no script for the second half!) and is just as effusive in his praise of his collaborators — particularly Cooder, Stockwell, and his editor, Peter Przygodda.
Video interview 1
Video interview 1
With Wenders by German journalist Roger Willemsen.
In German; Wenders talks about making films.
Documentary excerpts
Documentary excerpts
From 1990 documentary on Wenders, featuring interviews with Wenders, cinematographer Robby Müller, composer Cooder, actors Stanton, Dennis Hopper, Peter Falk, and Hanns Zischler, novelist Patricia Highsmith, and director Samuel Fuller.
This is really good with all these folks talking about Wenders’ style and abilities …
Video interview 2
Video interview 2
With filmmakers Allison Anders and Claire Denis.
Denis, on her role here; and Anders reading from her diaries and discussing her groupie-type experience of corresponding with Wenders, while still a UCLA film student (“I wrote him once a week”).
Anders became invaluable to Stanton when she opened up about a period in her teenage years when was a catatonic for awhile …
Wim Wenders Hollywood April ‘84
A segment from the French television program Cinéma cinémas, showing Wenders and Cooder at work on the score.
And of course, Wenders speaks fluent French — while driving his old, vintage car. He looks dazed on watching Cooder create the score, which he described as like a second camera filming the entire movie …
Deleted scenes
Deleted scenes
And Super 8 home movies.
The deleted scenes are delightful, but would have pushed the film to three hours. A judicious self-editor …
Gallery
Gallery
Of Wenders’ location-scouting photos.
A trailer that doesn’t divulge major plot points (such as they are in this film) is always better than one that does …
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