Summer in the City. 1970. West Germany. Directed by Wim Wenders. In German; English subtitles. 143 min.
Screenplay by Wim Wenders. With Hanns Zischler, Wenders, Gerd Stein, Helmut Färber. Wenders’s rarely screened feature debut, his thesis film for the University of Television and Film Munich, heralds the promise of a true auteur. Named after a Lovin’ Spoonful song and dedicated to The Kinks, Wenders’s film observes a lonely outsider, a former convict, dumped unceremoniously into a society that seems to respond with cold indifference. As he wanders from Munich to Berlin, Wenders notes, “the hero’s path is an escape route, driven by the hope to find a way back to himself through the mere movement of travel.”