BIFFes 2025: On the Wim Wenders and Krzysztof Kieslowski retrospectives
Between Wenders and Kieślowski, the viewer is provided two revelatory lenses through which to view a changing world and the nature of humanity itself
In February, Film Heritage Foundation hosted Wim Wenders’ touring retrospective, King of the Road. Audiences in Mumbai, Thiruvananthapuram, Kolkata, New Delhi and Pune got to watch repertory staples and back-catalogue treasures as part of an 18-film showcase, with the German filmmaker himself appearing at screenings for Q&As. The tour marked his first visit to India. Among the cities overlooked as hosts was Bengaluru whose FOMO-afflicted film lovers were offered consolation with an abridged showcase of five features at the 16th Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFes) from 1-8 March. The Krzysztof Kieślowski retrospective, which also played at the festival, was added consolation.
At 79, Wenders still stands as the grandmaster of restless brooders, adrift loners and open road romantics. The tarmac became a site of transformation in his earlier films. It opened up a world of possibilities for the outsider in search of purpose and reconciliation. Wenders gave the road movie, a distinctly American genre, a moodier existential makeover. He was a filmmaker smitten by the Hollywood bug. Yet, he was wary of the pervasiveness of American culture as the alienated youth of post-war West Germany got swept up in its popular exports. This ambivalence towards the US is part of the very texture of his films.
“When you drive through America, something happens to you. The images you see change you,” says Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) in Alice in the Cities (1974), a grainy black-and-white meditation on belonging, displacement and cultural imperialism which was the first of the Wenders films to be screened at BIFFes. Philip is a German journo on assignment in the US but unable to write about an alienating country. He can only engage with the vast landscapes he traverses by shooting Polaroids. When a young girl is abandoned in his care, their journey draws him out of himself, out of the passenger seat so to speak. Kings of the Road (1976) is a lyrical portrait of a friendship born out of shared loneliness. A travelling projector repairman (Vogler) and a depressed hitchhiker (Hanns Zischler) drive from one ramshackle theatre to another in towns dotted along desolate stretches of the Iron Curtain. The only theatres open are those showing Hollywood movies. “The Americans have colonised our subconscious,” says the hitchhiker. The statement still resonates as an indictment of a Hollywood-empowered cultural hegemony.
The American Friend (1977) recasts Patricia Highsmith’s calculating shapeshifter Tom Ripley in a more unhinged avatar. Wenders gives Dennis Hopper a cowboy hat, a pair of boots and a sense of disconnection to play the eponymous all-American hustler living in Germany. Bruno Ganz plays a mild-mannered picture framer who gets sucked into a murder-for-hire scheme. The film, freely adapted from Ripley’s Game, draws its strength from the tense interplay between the two characters and the actors playing them, one an American driven by instinct and prone to improvisation, the other a German methodical in approach and studied in reacting. The visual design was informed by another Hopper – American painter Edward Hopper. Over the course of the film, we see yellow New York cabs and Coca-Cola and hear of Bob Dylan and the Byrds. Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller make fun cameos. The heightened Americana serves to examine the myths and iconography from a distinct European vantage.
Paris, Texas (1984) hits the two-lane blacktop to find a crumbling panorama of roadside diners, shabby motels and faded billboards. From the arid wilderness emerges a seemingly mute drifter (Harry Dean Stanton) from his walkabout. We learn his name: Travis. We come to learn about the family he left behind. And on reuniting with his son Hunter (Hunter Carson), we follow the pair on a road trip to locate his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski). When Travis tracks Jane down at a peepshow, it sets the stage for one of cinema’s most arresting confessions, made all the more so on the big screen. The two are separated by a one-way mirror. He can see her but she can’t see him, leaving them to communicate through telephones on either side. On one side is a remorseful Stanton relating a story of love soured by too much rather than not enough, of insecurity leading to jealousy leading to alcoholic rage, of stoic masculinity mistaken for strength. On the other side is a mesmerising Kinski in a hot pink mohair sweater, registering each word till realisation slowly creeps across her face that the story being told is her own. When he asks her to turn off the light, a shot of his face superimposed over hers puts the old lovers on the same page, as if they are seeing each other with heartbreaking clarity for the first time. Paris, Texas is a transformative experience in a theatre. As Travis wanders the Mojave desert, we feel as parched and disoriented. Ry Cooder’s drawling notes on the guitar sound phenomenal. The gradations register strongly. The tactile details are exquisitely rendered. The grain is finely calibrated. Talk about pure cinema.
Angels serve as the collective memory of human existence in Wings of Desire (1987). Damiel (Ganz) has spent his eternal life eavesdropping on the inner torment of Berlin’s mortals. The frustration of being unable to interact with any of them starts to weigh heavily on him the moment he falls in love with a trapeze artist. When he experiences the physicality of the world for the first time, the black-and-white symphony of eternity transforms into the colourful frenzy of reality. The textured images lend an aesthetic grandeur and emotional intimacy to this city symphony. The Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column, and gorgeously lit interiors of the Berlin State Library look majestic, amplifying the film’s sense of place and atmosphere. Wenders’ Hollywood infatuation yields a delightful touch with the endearing Columbo star Peter Falk playing off his own image.
Like the angels in Wings of Desire, a nameless young man (Artur Barciś) appears as a silent onlooker in almost every episode of Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1988). He observes the resident sinners of a concrete Warsaw apartment block. But he does not intervene in their affairs. This recurring figure grants a spiritual dimension to ten stories of human fallibility. The lives of the residents converge and become entangled in a moral web as they cheat, pry, deceive and break every commandment. But Kieślowski and his long-time writing partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz do not moralise. Each episode is meant to question the certitude of the commandments and the absolutism of top-down edicts. Out of the ten, BIFFes screened only the two that were expanded to feature length.
In A Short Film About Killing, a disaffected young man kills a taxi driver without any apparent motive, a crime for which the state makes him pay with a systematically carried out execution. The sickly yellows, greens and browns accentuate the social and moral decay of Communist-era Poland. The colours pop and pulsate and envelope us in an otherworldly atmosphere. Kieślowski calls into question the legitimacy of capital punishment when a state sanctions the rationalised murder of a juvenile delinquent for committing a senseless murder. A Short Film About Love dials into the Cold War paranoia of being snooped on in its ironic exploration into looking, longing and loneliness. The precarious venture of filmmaking under communism receives closer scrutiny in Camera Buff (1979). A Polish factory worker purchases an 8mm camera to record his newborn daughter, his work and everything around him while leaving his own life unexamined. When his film faces censorship from the ruling apparatus, it reveals all-too-familiar challenges to artistic expression.
Kieślowski was fascinated by the poetics of chance and all the curious intersections of human existence. This fascination manifested as coincidences, near-misses, dualities and intertwined lives in his films, a cinematic universe with its own look, feel and logic. The flagship effort encompassing a lot of these motifs came with The Double Life of Veronique (1991), a twin portrait of intuition and identity. The amber glow blanketing the film gives a divine radiance to Irène Jacob who plays a Polish choir soprano and a French music teacher, two identical women living thousands of miles apart but whose destinies are mysterious linked. The interplay of light and shadow in the film creates its own mystery. Sensuality has seldom looked as luminous on screen.
No Kieślowski showcase would be complete without Three Colours, his swansong triptych of pretty women facing existential dilemmas. Named for the colours of the French flag, Blue (1993), White (1994) and Red (1994) re-examine the ideals of the French Revolution in an updated context. Freedom, in Blue, pertains to a grieving Juliette Binoche being able to find love and purpose again after her husband and daughter’s deaths. Equality, in White, lies in revenge as a Polish barber (Zbigniew Zamachowski) seeks leverage over his French ex-wife (Julie Delpy) — an allegory of the power imbalance between Eastern and Western Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. Fraternity, in Red, stems from the unseen forces that bind the fates of a lonely young model (Irène Jacob) and a lonely retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant). Kieślowski’s striking colour sense and glorious orchestrations make these films so beautiful to look at. Zbigniew Preisner’s gorgeous scores lend an ethereal quality to each, with theatre speakers adding appreciable depth.
Between Wenders and Kieślowski, we are provided two revelatory lenses through which to view a changing world and the nature of humanity itself. If there were 10 commandments of cinema, the first should surely be: Thou shalt not miss an opportunity to watch these hallowed gems of the cinematic canon on the big screen.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.