Alice in the Cities

Wim Wenders's Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten) opened in 1974 and won the German Film Critics Award for Best Direction. It is the first part of what is now called his Road Movie trilogy, followed by Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976), and it set out the New German Cinema's preoccupation with American influence on post-war European life, which Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog would each work through in their own register.

Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler, Wenders's frequent collaborator), a German journalist on a stalled American magazine commission, drifts through East Coast motels taking Polaroids instead of writing the article he owes. At a New York airport he finds himself accidentally responsible for nine-year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer, a wonderfully unaffected child performer), whose mother has decided to fly to Amsterdam without her. The two return to Europe together, and the second half follows Philip's search for Alice's grandmother across the industrial cities of the Ruhr: Wuppertal, Essen, Gelsenkirchen.

Robby Müller's monochrome photography of motel parking lots, autoroute service stations and the Wuppertal monorail set one of the defining European looks of the 1970s, and you can see it in Jim Jarmusch, in Aki Kaurismäki and across the slow-cinema tradition. It is Wenders's most important early film because of its patience: it gives adult drift and childhood seriousness the same tender, watchful attention.