FILM EXHIBITIONS

Wim Wenders

March 2–17, 2015

The Museum of Modern Art celebrates Wim Wenders (b. 1945), one of postwar Germany’s most accomplished and influential filmmakers, with a major career retrospective. This exhibition represents a collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival, which dedicates its 2015 Homage to Wenders, presenting him with an Honorary Golden Bear award for lifetime achievement; and with Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film und Fernsehen.

MoMA’s retrospective of 20 feature films and numerous shorts captures the breadth of Wenders’s career, from his 16mm experimental works of the late 1960s, including Same Player Shoots Again (1967) and Silver City Revisited (1968), to his most recent nonfiction work, The Salt of the Earth (2014), a profile of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Codirected by Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the documentary won Un Certain Regard Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and will be commercially released by Sony Pictures Classics later this month.

In what essentially amounts to a master class with the filmmaker, Wenders introduces the entire first week of retrospective screenings, and joins his longtime collaborator Peter Handke—the Austrian author who coscripted 3 American LPs (1969), The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971), Wrong Move(1975), and Wings of Desire (1987)—in a conversation moderated by the writer Ian Buruma. Wenders and Handke also present the North American premiere of a new 4K digital restoration of The Left-Handed Woman(1978), which Handke directed from his own novel and Wenders produced.

Also presented are new digital restorations of some of Wenders’s most cherished fiction and nonfiction films:The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1971); Alice in the Cities (1974); The American Friend (1977);Paris, Texas (1984); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989); and the North American premiere of Until the End of the World (1991/1994) in its full-length director’s cut. The retrospective culminates with Wenders’s vibrant documentaries about music, dance, and filmmaking: Nick’s Film: Lightning over Water (1980), A Trick of the Light(1996), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), The Soul of a Man (2003), and Pina (2011). All films are directed by Wim Wenders, unless otherwise noted.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, MoMA; and Thomas Beard, independent curator.

Special thanks to Sony Pictures Classics, the Berlinale, The Munich Film Museum, and Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum for Film und Fernsehen. All digital restorations by Wim Wenders Stiftung, 2014; courtesy Janus Films.