Wednesday | November 8, 2006 7:00 pm

The State of Things

Screening on Film

Directed by Wim Wenders.
With Patrick Bachau, Allen Goorwitz, Isabelle Weingarten.
West Germany, 1982, 16mm, black & white, 121 min.
German with English subtitles.

Described by Wenders as the last of the B-movies, The State of Things was borne out of his troubles shooting his first American film, Hammett—a failed collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola in which Wenders was forced to reshoot much of the film’s footage. A film crew waits in a hotel for funding to finish a movie while the director flies to Los Angeles to track down his producer. Using minimal plot and strands of narrative, Wenders expresses the creative impasse submerging contemporary cinema and its crippling inability to escape a state of moribund limbo to tell confident stories.