Paris, Texas (1984)
Directed by Wim Wenders
A man wanders out of the desert not knowing who he is. His brother finds him, and helps to pull his memory back of the life he led before he walked out on his family and disappeared four years earlier.
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20 films that influenced Paris, Texas
What critics say influenced Paris, Texas
Influenced by the American western as much as anything, German filmmaker Wim Wenders sets out to remake the mythic vision of John Fords The Searchers (1956) as a different kind of family story, reflecting the reality the director found when he set out to see what has become of the American West for himself.
Indeed, the narrative shares something in common with Ford’s 1956 film “The Searchers,” about a cowboy (John Wayne) on a journey to rescue his niece from an Indian tribe.
In this sense, Travis is an intriguing reformulation of the classic Western hero, an essential loner who is crucial to saving a community of which he can never be a part (not surprisingly, some critics have seen shades of John Wayne’s character from The Searchers in Travis).
In his Palm D�Or winning drama Paris, Texas, director Wim Wenders explores, and largely debunks, the macho cowboy myth that powers great Westerns like The Searchers while updating it to a contemporary milieu.
You can find echoes of The Searchers in Travis’ odyssey, right down to his quest to reunite a splintered and separated family and the recognition that there’s no place for him in this family.
The film´s ending, which is often and aptly compared to "The Searchers," witnesses a genuine moving reunion between mother and son but also ends on a note of ambiguity.
It isn’t clear where we are exactly, but the landscape is reminiscent of Monument Valley in John Wayne’s Stagecoach and The Searchers .
The only time I can recall anything similar might be the minimalist music to go along with Murder by Contract (1958).
Previously he had explored the more closed-in spaces of Europe in the German language films "Alice in the Cities" (1974) and "Kings of the Road" (1976) but with "Paris, Texas" (1984) he turned his gaze (and Robbie Müller´s) to the wide-open highways and byways of America which fascinated so many European directors (Wenders´ New German Cinema compatriot Werner Herzog took a similar turn in 1977´s "Stroszek.")
This artificiality can perhaps be attributed to German-born Wim Wenders’ perception of the American Midwest (a perception also evident in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point).
(It's a look at Americans as kind-eyed aliens that serves as an almost unbearably piquant counterpart to New German Cinema-mate Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas.)
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A decade earlier, Peter Bogdanovich had paid tribute to the great Western directors in The Last Picture Show by coupling the horizontal grandeur of their black and white shots with the straitening reality of small-town Texas life.
Paris, Texas evokes the iconic forms of American cinema, from films noir like Detour and Vertigo to grandiose Westerns like The Searchers and Lonely Are the Brave , at the same time as it calls forth a new wave of postmodern filmmaking from slacker movies to the surrealism of David Lynch and Blue Velvet .
We’ve seen this time and time again, whether in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) or more recently in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011).
This artificiality can perhaps be attributed to German-born Wim Wenders’ perception of the American Midwest (a perception also evident in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point).
We’ve seen this time and time again, whether in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) or more recently in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (2011).
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It reminded me of another famous movie Travis – Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver .
Musician/Writer Matt Selou believes there are many similarities to the film Harry and Tonto – especially with the protagonist trying to fly but for some reason having to turn back at the airport and taking a car for the long distance.