Kings of the Road

The Wim Wenders retrospective at the local cinematheque provided us this week the opportunity to see the most famous film in the series of the 'road movies' made by the German director more than four decades ago. 'Kings of the Road' (the original title in German is 'Im Lauf der Zeit' which would mean 'Over the Time') is, in my opinion, one of the masterpieces of the genre, a reference film, a film whose beauty has not diminished over time, but on the contrary, seems to have been accentuated and amplified, gaining new meanings from the perspective of time.

The comparison with Dennis Hopper's 'Easy Rider' is inevitable. I'm sure that Wenders knew well and loved this movie. His heroes depicted on screen by Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler are not necessarily marginals such as those played by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, but same as the ones in the American movie, they cannot care less about social conventions, and choose the roads as a way of life. Roads mean running away and discovering. Self-discovery before anything else. Roads mean taking life as it is, meeting other people, trying to communicate, to connect one loneliness with another. From 'Easy Rider' and 'Kings of the Road' we learn and understand more about the America of the late 1960s or about Germany in the mid-1970s than from dozens of other books or movies.

Wenders' film has a second theme parallel to the one of roads - it's the decaying cinema houses. One of the film's heroes lives out of maintaining the projection equipment of the old cinemas in the small rural German villages. A job that becomes increasingly useless. Wenders anticipates Giuseppe Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso" for over a decade. 30 years after the end of the Second World War, the ruined Germany was disappearing, taking with it signs and symbols of a way of life that had not only negative aspects. The two characters of the film, apparently lost in a world dominated by order, are actually the symbols of a lost freedom.

'Kings of the Road' lasts three hours, three hours spent by the two characters in a truck, on country roads along the temporary border between the two Germanies, between one cinema already in ruins to another, or to one that still functions without spectators. Not much seems to happen in the movie. And yet the three hours pass quickly, like in a spell, because every minute is full of artistic substance, full of life.