Until the end of the word

Transport of delight: Alice in the Cities

In an early scene in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities (1973), the protagonist, a German writer at the end of an assignment to produce an article about the USA, arrives at the New York office of his publisher. Phillip (Rüdiger Vogler) is broke, past his deadline, and hoping for an advance. The problem is that he has failed to produce a single word of the commission, proffering instead a cardboard box full of images - Polaroid photos. He has told his story but used the wrong language, and so receives short shrift and no cash.

Trying to get a flight home, he encounters nine year old Alice (Yella Rottländer) and acts as translator for her mother, Lisa (Lisa Kreutzer), whose English is insufficient to negotiate with the PanAm desk girl. Later, in a touching reversal of this situation, Phillip is himself dependant on a truculent Alice to translate his instructions to the Amsterdam barber who is trimming his hair.
 
The film, a tender European subversion of the Hollywood road movie, offers a catalogue of the inadequacy of both words and images to communicate needs and desires. On their transatlantic flight, Phillip and Alice play the word game Hangman. When Phillip wins the game by using the word traum (dream) Alice protests that this is the wrong sort of word and only real things should count. Delightedly examining a Polaroid taken from the plane window she declares “What a lovely photo- it’s so empty!” In Amsterdam it becomes clear that Lisa has temporarily abandoned her daughter to the care of Phillip and so the unlikely pair set off on a quest through a succession of German towns in search of Alice’s grandmother.
 
The child is unable to name the place where her grandma lives, but reveals a Proustian fragment of memory, neither word nor image but texture and sound - coal dust rustling the pages of a story book. This leads the duo to search the Ruhr district in a Renault 4 - antithesis of the Hollywood road trip automobile - hired with the last of Phillip’s travellers cheques. Casually, Alice reveals that in her luggage she actually has a photograph of Grandma’s house. This turns out to be a nondescript building, typical of the region, but by an unlikely coincidence the image does eventually lead them to the house. But Grandma has moved away two years previously, leaving no forwarding address.
 
Earlier, Phillip escapes his charge by handing her over to the police, and, chancing on a flyposted advertising image, he attends an open-air concert by Chuck Berry -
“Help me find the party tried to get in touch with me,
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call…”
 
Apparently the song was Wenders’ original inspiration for his story. He has recounted that he and his cameraman, Robbie Müller, did actually shoot some footage at a Berry concert in Germany, but were unable to afford the rights and eventually had to use clips of an American concert from a secondary source, which they were never satisfactorily able to match to Müller's 16mm black and white for the rest of the film.
 
While Alice in the Cities is generically situated within the New German Cinema project of asserting a German identity in the face of US cultural hegemony, the brief scene at the concert serves to confirm Phillip/Wenders’ love of American popular culture and to offer a counterbalance to his frustration in the face of the banality of American media - established in an earlier scene where Phillip destroys a motel TV set.
 
Although in going to the Chuck Berry gig Phillip is at last doing something he wants to do, in the company of a cool crowd of his own generation, a brief close-up seems to point to his isolation and lack of purpose in the absence of his recently acquired responsibility. The intuitive (and ultimately more resourceful) Alice has meanwhile evaded her police guardians at the first opportunity and that evening, like a film noir detective, she slips from her hiding place in the city shadows and back into her place in the passenger seat of the Renault.
           
Misunderstandings and the deliberate withholding of information are familiar and vital elements of the vocabulary of storytelling, as are improbable coincidences. Words and images serve to frustrate an immediate goal, thereby enabling a broader or more rewarding one. Several times Alice withholds information which might have curtailed the adventure, just as at the beginning Phillip supplied his publisher with copious deliverables, but not in the required form, thereby precipitating the remainder of the plot.
 
At a Netherlands bus stop (where, in overt homage to Hitchcock, Philip and Alice are placed near a sign that reads “Northwest”) Alice asks to take a Polaroid of Phillip - “So you can see what you look like.” We may wonder whether this image will serve its intended purpose any more effectively than the one of Grandma’s house.
 
Lisa’s initial difficulty at the airport at the start of the film resonates throughout. We have understood that flights home are delayed or cancelled, but our command of the local language is too poor to negotiate an alternative.

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©Ballooon mein Herr,  2018