KINGS OF THE ROAD—IN THE COURSE OF TIME Movie Review

Im Lauf der Zeit

Bruno (Rüdiger Vogler) is a traveling, freelance movie-projector repairman, whose route takes him along the borderline separating what had been East and West Germany. While parked in his van one day, a VW comes whizzing by and crashes into a nearby river. Out of the river comes Robert (Hanns Zischler), a man who has just fled his family. Bruno takes him along. The original title of Wim Wenders's hypnotic Kings of the Road was In the Course of Time; that title is far more accurate about where we're headed, for toward the end of this deceptively rambling series of modest adventures set in towns with old, decaying movie theatres, an epiphany is reached. Bruno flashes on the trip they've made, on the pieces of film that run through projectors, on the cinematic histories of nations that can—as was the case with Germany after the war—suddenly and abruptly stop. He sees his own life as both a piece of time and a history, and realizes that the years—the course of time—in which his life has unspooled has become his history. Wenders places this thought at the heart of a long, epic movie that takes us from one point in a divided, dispirited land to another in a way that lets us feel that forward motion and the time the journey takes. We're reminded by Bruno's revelation that the film we're watching—and the people in it whom we've come to consider friends—are slipping away from us as the frames of the film we're looking at race through the projector. Bruno tries to keep those machines in good working order, but eventually they give out too. It's Wenders's inspiration to be able to make us remember that cinema is life, and that our life—our lives—are history that we make in the finite period of time given to us. A gentle, poetic, physically stunning film, Kings of the Road acquires new power and richer meaning with each viewing.

NEXT STOP … Alice in the Cities, The State of Things, Wings of Desire

1976 176m/B GE Ruediger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Elisabeth Kreuzer; D: Wim Wenders; W: Wim Wenders; C: Robby Muller, Martin Schafer; M: Axel Linstadt. VHS FCT, GLV, TPV