A three-hour study of two men who are on the road, servicing the projectors in failing movie theatres, Kings of the Road is full of film references and the situation of a Hawksian bond tested against the newer threats of tedium and cultural deterioration in which Germany has become a satellite of Americana. The pace is leisurely, and the action is not emphatic, but Kings of the Road is one of the best films of the seventies. It seemed to predict Wenders’ future: an increasingly existential concern underlying the unforced dealings between lonely people.
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Andre Deutsch, 1994)
The increasingly strong ‘family’ resemblances between Wim Wenders’ feature films have begun to create the impression that his ‘travelling’ movies (like Bergman’s psychological odysseys) can be phrased, if not resolved, in terms of their similarities. Like The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, Kings of the Road takes place in border regions, which have clear implications for Wenders’ heroes, fretting about the need for some breakthrough in communication or perception; like Alice in the Cities, it takes the form of an overtly Oedipal quest to penetrate and come to terms with the past, and looks to children for the kind of innocence needed to reinvent old and ‘used up’ forms of language (here, cinema and the printed word).
Summing up the films as neatly as anything, there is a line of dialogue in Kings of the Road in which Robert Lander, having earlier told his travelling companion that he is a children’s doctor, confesses that this is not quite true: ‘Actually, I work on the borderlines, linguistics and paediatrics’ (he goes on to describe how at first ‘figures are an adventure, later writing becomes a routine’ and talks about one boy for whom lines were paths along which letters moved by motorbike – a pen). The similarities also include a network of details, such as the photograph of a house which Alice belatedly produced in the earlier film to guide her reluctant guardian to her home, and which Lander is seen tearing up (hard to say if it is the same photograph) in the opening scenes of Kings of the Road in his mock suicidal charge away from his broken marriage. There is even some repetition of names – ‘Winter’ played by Rüdiger Vogler both here and in Alice in the Cities – and such odd stylistic traits as the unexpected, interpolated aerial views of a landscape – which is otherwise ‘naturalistically’ incorporated as part of the plot.
The achievement of Kings of the Road is both the limpid assurance with which such elements are combined with a straightforward narrative (by comparison, say, with Wrong Movement) and the extraordinary complexity with which the mechanics of the ‘buddy’ movie are converted into a double reflection on language. On a psychological level, Bruno and Robert’s brief association leads to a rediscovery and to some extent a resolution of their personal histories: Bruno returns to the island home where he grew up with his mother, and achieves a kind of liberation from the isolating ‘bunker’ he has made of his travelling workshop, as he puts it, ‘For the first time I see myself as someone who has gone through certain time. And that time is my history. This is quite comforting’; Robert returns to his editor-publisher father, and airs his grievances about the domination of his past by the printed word by tapping out a special edition of the old man’s newspaper.
Re-enactments of a kind of birth trauma turn out to be as common in the film as images of travelling, from Robert’s emergence from the water at the beginning, having driven his car more thoughtlessly than self-destructively into a river, to Bruno’s prowling round the derelict home of his childhood at night. As he stands alone in morning mist near the end of the film, wrapped in a blanket, having spent the night in an old American army emplacement right on the border with East Germany, Bruno lets rip with something akin to a primal scream.
On a figurative level, their journey is an examination of the means and limits of cinema and the written word, and also involves varieties of discovery, from Robert picking over every scrap of printed matter he encounters on the way, to the delightful sequence of the ‘invention’ of silent comedy, when the two men are repairing a speaker behind a cinema screen, before an audience of impatient children, and after the screen is suddenly flooded with light, they go into a routine of acrobatic shadow-mime.
The film concludes even more pessimistically on this level than on the psychological, or at least ends by insisting on a similar return to degree zero and a new beginning. As Robert simply wanders away, to continue his journey by train (he has always been the more concerned with actually going somewhere), he encounters a small boy noting down straightforward descriptions of the things he sees around him, and Robert trades his few remaining possessions for the notebook. Bruno is last seen where he began, repairing a projector in a smalltown movie-house and listening to an elderly projectionist lament the death of the cinema. The lament, of course, is also Wenders’ own, but in a way its purpose is as much a psychological purging as the characters’ experiences in the film: the oft-invoked figure of Lang (as with Ford in Alice) serves more as a necessary but finally perishable father figure than he does for specific filmic reference. The final image seems to imply that this aspect of Wenders’ career – as well as his nostalgic phase of black-and-white movie making – is over: the cinema’s illuminated sign, ‘Weisse Wand’ (White Screen), is malfunctioning so that only three letters, spelling ‘end’, are alight, next to the cinema’s entwined initials, ‘WW’.
Richard Combs, Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1977
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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