Wednesday | November 1, 2006 7:00 pm

Kings of the Road

Screening on Film

Directed by Wim Wenders.
With Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Lisa Kreuzer.
West Germany, 1976, 16mm, black & white, 176 min.
German with English subtitles.

Wenders’ ultimate road movie follows an itinerant cinema mechanic (Vogler) and his partner (Zischler) as they drive through marginal towns along the border of the former East and West Germanies. Episodic in structure and leisurely in tempo, Kings of the Road blends scenes of highways and towns with references to the movies of Godard, Ozu, Lang, and others—all the while creating a subtle rite of passage for its road-bound protagonists. As the film tracks the motions of these figures in a landscape, states of mind and senses of place emerge powerfully.