by Francesco Scazzosi CCS
When our ever-attentive and passionate editorial team suggested I write a piece on the retrospective promoted by Circuito Cinema — “Wenders on the Road”, which over the coming days will bring several restored masterworks by Wim Wenders to the Cinema Nuovo Olimpia in Rome — and encouraged me to explore the fruitful collaboration between the German director and cinematographer Robby Müller, I felt both fortunate and grateful. Fortunate, because it struck me immediately as a perfect opportunity to revisit some cornerstones of postwar cinema history that I hadn’t seen in a long time; and infinitely grateful to have found a concrete and rather singular pretext for pausing to reflect on the vision and poetics of filmmakers I have always deeply loved, and whose importance and cultural impact on entire generations of filmmakers and audiences I had, somewhat guiltily, allowed to recede from my mind — an influence that remains, even today, extraordinarily powerful.
Unable to contain within these few lines the infinite swirl of images that came flooding back to me, I decided to open this piece by placing two frames side by side. The black and white of Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities, 1974): a telephone box, a man hunched over the receiver, behind the glass the vertical New York of the Chrysler Building — an almost involuntary echo of Elliott Erwitt’s street photography; and the unnatural, geometric green of Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend, 1977): an ambulance cleaving through a tunnel at full speed, the fluorescent light of green neon casting its tint over everything — the same chromatic saturation that, in those years, was erupting in the photography of William Eggleston, shown in a landmark exhibition at MoMA in New York in 1976.
At first glance, they might seem to belong to entirely different cinematic universes. And yet they come from the same eye, just three years apart. An eye that is, in truth, doubled — almost symbiotic: that which unites Robby Müller, one of the most influential and pioneering cinematographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and Wim Wenders, the director — who needs no introduction — with whom Müller would share eleven films and over twenty-five years of artistic companionship. Between these two frames — taken here simply as a starting point for reflection — what resonates is not an immediately recognisable style, but rather a shared way of standing before things, of observing reality and grasping its narrative potential.
Throughout his long career, Müller consistently showed no interest in pursuing a single, unified stylistic signature. He was, rather, a versatile creator of visual syntagms: capable of taking reality for what it is, absorbing its deeper meaning and returning to the viewer images with a strong narrative identity, rather than constructing a discourse made of aesthetic ornament alone. It is precisely this discursive structure, formed within a partnership as long as it was rare, that unites films so apparently different on a visual level. In certain respects — as we shall see at greater length further on — we will find it again in Wenders’s later films, entrusted by natural necessity to other cinematographers. In the relationship between these two frames, taken here as symbolic images, something deeper than a simple artistic partnership can already be glimpsed.
Wenders and Müller belong to the generation of European filmmakers who, more than any other, looked to contemporary American cinema — above all its most revolutionary and off-label currents — as a promise of freedom: a raw, subjective freedom that in those years was erupting in the New Hollywood, and before that, in embryonic form, in the masters who had fathered it — Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, John Ford, Howard Hawks. Wenders and Müller, by geography and generation, were not part of this movement, but came to encounter it at a later moment, from a distance: from Europe and from German cinema. What we can say with certainty today is that they understood it deeply, made it their own with full awareness, and gave it back amplified through a gaze that was at once intensely personal and profoundly European.
The clearest proof of this lies in the fact that, through that indirect dialogue with an America first imagined, then lived and recorded, Müller would make his way into American cinema as one of the most sought-after cinematographers of that era — one need only think of his celebrated collaborations, among many others, with Peter Bogdanovich (Saint Jack, 1979), William Friedkin (To Live and Die in L.A., 1985), through to his long partnership with Jim Jarmusch, across the six landmark films beginning with Down by Law (1986) through to Dead Man (1995).
Since we are speaking of partnerships, this may be the moment to recall that the one with Wim Wenders lasted twenty-five years and eleven feature films — alongside various other projects, large and small.— a partnership that cannot be measured in numbers alone, but in the intensity of the artistic result. A relationship so fruitful is only possible when two authors think about image and narrative in the same way. We can point without hesitation to the film that stands as the clearest manifesto of this symbiosis: Paris, Texas (1984), universally recognised as the pinnacle of a certain kind of cinema.
It is worth reflecting on how Müller learned his craft through a process of near-constant subtraction. The foundation of his work was the behaviour of available light. It is important to remember, too, that before this approach became a kind of implicit poetics, it was — by virtue of something intrinsic to their way of making cinema — a virtuoso use of necessity. From that urgency they drew, with remarkable mastery, a creative principle: the success of an image lies in convincing the viewer of the rightness of its own nature — a rightness that is twofold: towards the reality and towards the story the image tells. Always to seek the most fitting vantage point on things. For Müller and Wenders, the problem was never to impose a form on reality, but to recognise the form most suited to revealing its meaning. The study of light was simply the most visible expression of this tension: the continual search for the right form to say what the film needed to say. In their cinema, form and content do not proceed separately — they are born together and together they reveal themselves.
“So, I brought myself back to looking, really looking and thinking over what it’s all about. And when you strip everything down, it really is a lens, film, a camera and one knob – on and off.”
Müller’s visual imagination is, however, constantly inhabited by an implicitly cultivated sensibility — that of a tireless consumer of the visual nourishment with which the world is saturated, and from which he seems almost compelled to draw with both hands. Jim Jarmusch would describe him as a Dutch painter born in the wrong century, and the comparison with Vermeer or de Hooch is by no means a mannered affectation: Müller seems to inherit almost by birthright the great Dutch tradition of light, carrying it into cinema without ever citing it explicitly.
To this drive — almost inscribed in his DNA and shaped by indirect influences — is added the lesson drawn from the naturalist tradition in which Müller was formed: neorealism, the Nouvelle Vague, cinéma vérité, and above all his mentor Gérard Vandenberg, from whom he learned the ability to master the happy surprises of natural light and its many inflections.
From this double nature — absorbed knowledge and instinct transformed into thought and vision — his way of working was born. The more than two thousand Polaroids he left us, collected in a rich and scrupulously ordered archive curated by his wife, are the most tangible proof of this: taken in hotel rooms, on the road, between one shot and the next, they were at once studies in light — how a shadow falls across a bed, how a window cuts through a view — and a collection of gazes: a wunderkammer of the imagination built one fragment at a time. Devouring the world as a daily practice, in order to give it back through cinema — not by chance the need for instant development, that tireless urgency to see, to frame, to collect, to note down.
It is the same reverence for light that critics acknowledge when they place him alongside Vermeer: as Bianca Stigter wrote of these Polaroids, Müller “does not use light to render a scene, [but] a scene to render the light.”
It is probably within this exploratory frame that the fortunate encounter with Wenders and the New German Cinema should be read — the wave of young filmmakers who, in 1962, with the Oberhausen Manifesto, had declared a certain conception of classical cinema dead, with the rallying cry of “Papas Kino ist tot” — a programme of rupture with the lazy bourgeois habits of ready-made, polished, academic filmmaking — before embracing a personal, radically free cinema built on scarcity of means.
Within that wave, in constant aesthetic and political dialogue with the Nouvelle Vague and the America of the New Hollywood, their partnership became a visual laboratory, in which European introspection and the grand epics of the American myth were cross-bred: documentary truth and the painter’s scratch, the gaze as knowledge and risk-taking as exploration. The use of natural light and the courage of their choices were no longer simply a fallback dictated by production and technical constraints — they had finally become the method.
Alice nelle città it arises precisely from a constraint. Wenders and Müller wanted to shoot it in 35mm, using the newly released ARRIFLEX 35 BL — the first “blimped” ARRI, self-silenced and therefore finally extraordinarily manageable; but the camera was nowhere to be found, the budget too lean, and there was nothing for it but to fall back on 16mm, later blown up to 35mm. From that “constraint”, however, they extracted a language: the naturalness of camera movement, freedom, lightness, dance — that non-aesthetic aesthetic that erupts from a smaller negative. The high-contrast black and white, the visible grain that the film makes no attempt to conceal — and which the recent 4K restoration had the good sense to leave intact and visible, as an integral part of the aesthetic experience itself — the lightweight camera that allows shooting from unusual angles, from a moving car, from a train, from within the street itself: everything conspires to produce an image that is all the more free for being all the more “poor” in technique. The constraint becomes emancipation: the very spirit that the New German Cinema asserted against the “Papas Kino” of rules and comfort takes form here.
In Alice in den Städten there is the protagonist: a journalist travelling across America who, unable to write the piece he is supposed to deliver, manages to put together “only” an endless pile of Polaroids — a blocked reporter who is also, evidently, a self-portrait of that way of looking. In short, the staging of the defeat of logos, of the word, in the face of that overwhelmingly pragmatic and sensory world that is America. Wenders and Müller proceed in some sense in parallel with the journalist, who struggles to find an ordered narrative within what is an eminently tactile journey — almost a descent — or perhaps an ascent — into the imaginative world of Lewis Carroll (not by chance the girl is called Alice), a world in which the senses — and sight above all — hold sway and continually triumph over the word. Language, the verb, no longer seem sufficient, just as traditional narrative is no longer adequate. It is almost an implicit meta-analysis of the creative flow of this new cinema of borders. A rough black and white, the European gaze recording America as an out-of-the-ordinary, slightly undone elsewhere, carries nonetheless the hardness of the great documentary photographers: it is the same visual discourse as Robert Frank. Everything seems to wink at still photography: the Swiss photographer who had looked at America and above all at Americans ( The Americans) with the sharp and fascinated eye of the outsider — a parallel that critics propose often, but which never fails to be remarkably effective.
But there is here, above all, the seed of a style already in bud. A rapport so deep could not fail to leave traces that outlast any single collaboration: Wenders too, for his part, would continue to seek out that black and white even when Müller was no longer behind the camera — entrusting it to another master of light, Henri Alekan, in Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987). That same high-contrast monochrome Müller would carry with him, for instance, into his films with Jarmusch: in Down by Law and in Dead Man. The partnership, in short, would continue to operate unconsciously within them even after they went their separate ways.
That same shared gaze — Müller and Wenders — in The American Friend., the film moves into colour — and what colour — yet without changing its nature: only the expressive medium changes. Freely adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley saga, it is a thriller; visually, it is a neo-noir — or rather a NEON-NOIR: the American genre that Europe has loved and reinterpreted most. Here it is transplanted into the Hamburg night, the livid Paris, the dirty New York of the seventies. The light is artificial yet never so “natural” — made of neon and fluorescent tubes; the greens, the modernist hyper-saturations — cold blues, deadened golds, sickly browns — do not describe, but almost infect. It is the light of paranoia, and the city becomes an urban landscape of estrangement, of alienation, almost always portrayed during the blue hour… when artificial lights merge into nature and natural light fuses into the architectural fabric, becoming so perfect as to seem unreal, or hyper-real — evoking, not by chance, Hopper.
In those same years, on the other side of the ocean, that same pre-nocturnal light and the colour of countless squalid interiors were beginning to be the world that Nan Goldin would shortly afterwards catalogue with extraordinary precision on photographic film: two gazes trained on the atmospheres of the contemporary, exploratively very similar. Wenders, for his part, literally stages his own American spiritual fathers, casting two masters — Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller — cinema hosting itself and rethinking itself in an act of self-consecration
This way of looking at the world never stopped at the set for Müller and Wenders: it became the foundation of an aesthetic sensibility that would leave its mark on both European and American cinema. A grammar that would find its consecration in Paris, Texas, yet one that reaches well beyond its own boundaries — it can be recognised, years later, in the neon night of Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, cinematography by Robert Elswit) and in the nocturnal Los Angeles of Collateral (Michael Mann, cinematography by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron).
Around the time of Paris, Texas (not included in the retrospective), Wim Wenders travelled through the West with a medium-format camera, photographing possible locations but above all the effects of light on reality itself: the result was Written in the West— Cibachrome prints later exhibited in large format, and much later still in a series of exhibitions placed explicitly under the significant influence of Edward Hopper. Director and director of photography — in this case two components of the same eye — collect still images and create the light and the conditions for telling stories in motion. This is not an activity running parallel to cinema, but its natural continuation in life. Müller’s Polaroids and Wenders’s photographs constitute a true workshop of the gaze: the place where, away from the set, the same search that animates their films continues — the search for the right form, the right moment, and the most fitting vantage point on things.
Paris, Texas itself (1984) will remain in all likelihood the pinnacle of this exceptional partnership — America no longer nocturnal and urban but boundless and diurnal, the full light of the desert: the highest point that way of looking ever reached. And it will be the measure against which everything else, sooner or later, must reckon.
That trace, built over years of shared work, will remain legible even in the three films in the retrospective that Müller did not shoot. That way of measuring oneself against reality does indeed continue to resurface. Lisbon Story (1994) brings back an old acquaintance: Philip Winter, the same character as in Alice.. Twenty years on, he no longer roams America with a Polaroid, but Lisbon with a recorder — a sound recordist summoned by a vanished director to give sound to the images the latter has left behind. At its heart, his task consists in attempting to complete something that remains inevitably unfinished: following traces and seeking a form capable of restoring their meaning. It is once again a film about making images and their significance, born as a documentary on the city and transformed in the process into a meditation on cinema itself: the journey of a flâneur, just as the journalist of Alice. The cinematography is by Lisa Rinzler, an American who came to cinema from painting, and who fills the white city with colour and sunlight: another hand, another temperament. Yet the stake is the same as that pursued since Alice: capturing the real, and coming to understand how difficult it is to grasp its complexity. Müller’s trace lives here, then, in the gaze itself — almost embodied by that man who, twenty years on, continues his search with the same relentless drive.
The Million Dollar Hotel is the most overtly Hollywood production in Wenders’s career — born from an idea by Bono, produced by Mel Gibson’s Icon, with Milla Jovovich and a score by U2 — and yet its cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael (Greek, trained in the fine arts, with a background in photojournalism, and later admitted to the ASC in 2000), shoots the Los Angeles underworld and the crumbling downtown hotel with an unwavering fidelity to available light. He openly cites Müller and Néstor Almendros as his models, and sums up his own approach in five words: “I don’t like to over-light.”
This is the moment at which the trace becomes explicit: an aesthetic born on the margins, from scarcity of means, enters a well-resourced production machine and finds, remarkably, the space to feel at home. Here too, light is not imposed upon the world but drawn from it. Papamichael builds an atmosphere within an already existing atmosphere: the corridors of the hotel, the windows, the faces and the decayed spaces of downtown Los Angeles seem to live by the light reflected from the world around them before any cinematographic light from the set. It is a subtle but decisive distinction: the image is not forced upon reality — it is born instead from a trust that reality itself already contains, in potential, its own visual form.
Twenty-one years after Paris, Texas, Don’t Come Knocking returns to the American West. The cinematography is by Franz Lustig, and here the trace no longer passes through a declaration but through very concrete visual references. Wenders and Lustig openly named Edward Hopper as the model for their light — the same Hopper who runs through the director’s entire visual imagination, up to and including a 2020 short film devoted entirely to the painter — and, with its motionless horizons and long static shots, the film’s America-as-landscape is a sustained, close-range invocation of Paris, Texas.
Müller is absent, and there is no longer any need to name him: his lesson has become the very air that cinema breathes; his way of understanding light has built an imaginative world. And this is the point. Rinzler‘s painter’s eye, Papamichael’s influences, the Hopper of Wenders and Lustig, the gathered and rarely constructed light that runs from Alice through to the desert of Don’t Come Knocking: it is the same thread, the same leitmotiv. That way of treating light has entered the language of cinema so deeply that it no longer needs to be associated with a single name. It is recognisable across the board. It has become an implicit poetics. It is taken almost for granted in Wenders’s films. Yet one name, in all honesty, is always with us. It is the man who taught the courage to dare — to push as far as one could push, to wait for the right light and to welcome the accident as an integral part of the work. It is the courage of the gaze. You can still see it today, in the end, in those Polaroids. To describe him from another angle, it helps to paraphrase the remarkable words of his wife Andrea Müller-Schirmer, curator of his personal archive, art historian and photo editor: Robby Müller was above all a man in a hotel room, exploring with his Polaroid the play of light — observing how it filters through the shutters or seeps through a shirt, how daylight changes over the course of the hours, and how different light sources transform a room. Robby Müller loved to photograph the world around him, whatever caught his eye on his walks. He played with the properties of light and colour, exploring them tirelessly, with a particular fondness for the blue hour, when natural and artificial light meet. His Polaroids of American cars resemble film stills — like the car in front of the neon-lit exterior of a bar in Santa Fe, or the Cadillac from the film Mystery Train di Jim Jarmusch.
His interest in reflections emerges, for instance, in the distorted image of a sea of yellow New York taxis. At times he would return to the same subject more than once; in one series, the curtains of a hotel room window billow in the wind: at the outset the light comes from outside, but as the sequence progresses the window darkens and the light of a lamp gradually takes control of the scene.
In closing, this retrospective is genuinely worth going to the cinema for. It is a precious opportunity to see — or to see again — masterworks of this calibre on the big screen, and also to move through, guided by these five emblematic films, a journey that bears witness to the power of a personal gaze that has, over time, become both iconic and universal. A cinema that has moved through history leaving a lasting mark on the collective imagination. Above all, we can say it without hesitation: these filmmakers have helped shape a pioneering visual imagination, giving us one of the most memorable ways of looking at the world in contemporary history.
