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, becoming the first chapter of what is now known as Wenders's Road Movie trilogy — followed by Wrong Move (1975) and Kings of the Road (1976). The film established the New German Cinema preoccupation with American cultural influence on post-war European life that Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog would each work 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 becomes accidentally responsible for nine-year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer, in a remarkable child performance), whose mother has decided to fly to Amsterdam without her. The two return to Europe together, and the second half of the film is Philip's increasingly committed search for Alice's grandmother across the Ruhr industrial cities — Wuppertal, Essen, Gelsenkirchen.

Robby Müller's monochrome photography of motel parking lots, autoroute service stations, and the Wuppertal monorail produced one of the foundational European visual registers of the 1970s — directly influential on Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismäki, and the slow-cinema tradition more broadly. The film's tender, watchful patience with both adult drift and childhood seriousness is among the qualities that make it Wenders's most quietly important early work.