Alice in the Cities opens with the camera gazing up at a plane passing over a North Carolina beach town and closes by looking down over a train winding through the Ruhr Valley. In between these opposing bookends is the story of a West German journalist, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), who has been driving across the United States gathering material for an article. He runs out of money and needs to return home. While planning his flight, he is put in charge of a precocious little girl as her mother goes off to handle a failing relationship. That girl is Alice (Yella Rottländer), and the cities she visits with Winter include New York, Amsterdam, and Wuppertal—all of which are beautifully shot in black and white by Robby Müller.
The soul of the film is in how they deal with their problems and with each other. It doesn’t matter that Alice is 9 and Winter is 31—they both feel unseen, Alice by her mother, and Winter by a world that doesn’t recognize his talent.
Early on, Winter is rather immature and self-centered. There’s a scene in which he argues with his publisher. He won’t make the deadline, though he has gathered a lot of polaroid photos and some notes. “You weren’t supposed to take pictures,” his boss says, “You were supposed to write a story.” Winter responds: “Yes I know. But the story is about the things you can see, about images and signs. When you drive around America, something happens to you. The images you see change you. And the reason I took so many photos is part of the story.” Still, he loses the job.
In another scene, Winter doesn’t even notice that he’s being dumped by his lover because he’s too busy monologuing to her about the banalities of the American landscape and the vulgarities of mass media.1
Every bright young artist has been in Winter’s position. But life would probably go much better for him if only he could look outside himself now and then—and not only through a polaroid.2 As the film goes on and he is forced to deal with meaningful responsibilities other than his work, he paradoxically scribbles more and more in his notebook. The writer’s block has loosened, and he may yet finish his story.
And what of little Alice? Perhaps what she needed in that moment, abandoned by her mother with a stranger in a strange land, is not safety in a father’s arms, but an adventure with a big brother. A chance to exist in the world of adults without her mother watching over her: she has carefree moments with Winter, doing calisthenics at rest stops and taking photo booth pictures; and when she misbehaves, she has to deal with his anger all alone.
She also copes with jealousy, though she may not yet put it in such terms, when they meet a woman in a park whom Winter is clearly attracted to. Even though nothing happens, Alice senses his attention drifting away, and later puts on a sundress to compete for his affection. The scene is totally innocent; these days, especially in the United States, we tend to sexualize and criminalize relationships, but there are no sinister undertones here. Philip Winter is far, far away from Humbert Humbert, even if there are some superficial similarities between their stories. Wenders shows that there can be emotional realism, even harsh truths, without brutality.
Alice and Winter get around in a number of ways, but the vehicles are never treated as mere transportation devices. They have their own aesthetics, their own rhythms: the great stretches of American highway seen through a windshield, with giant neon signs advertising fuel and fast food to nighttime drivers; the steady beats of train tracks in sync with the cantilevers passing by; the peculiar sight of a city shrinking to the size of a model town as the plane takes off; the breathtaking view of Wuppertal seen from its iconic Schwebebahn, the oldest suspension railway in the world.
Many of these scenes were filmed illegally, according to Vogler: “…on the highway at night around New York City, or on the long subway ride, I don’t think we had permits for any of that. In that sense there’s a documentary value to it.” (There are other documentary touches: Wenders filmed chronologically and threw out the script early in the process, so the growing connection between Alice and Winter is totally genuine, and many of their riffs are improvised.)
Some of the shots had to be creatively arranged. Vogler again:
[Wenders and Müller] would take the car door off and attach the camera there. It extended three feet outside the car, with this crazy wire rigging so that they could film from [the passenger] side. Other times they’d attach the camera on my side, but I’d have to keep driving. In some scenes in America, I was alone in the car on the highway, and I turned on the lights and sound, clapped the slate, and drove the car.
Working a camera is both aesthetic and athletic work, and I have endless respect for great cameramen. Robby Müller, who died in 2018, was certainly one of them. In a tribute to Müller, Wenders describes their first meeting, when he was still a film student and Müller was assisting Gerard Vandenberg. I love this detail: “I was very impressed by this super-cool guy who could pull focus with one hand and roll a cigarette in the other. Soon afterwards, we made our first short film together: Alabama. That was a long time ago…” They went on to make many more films together, including Wenders’ magnum opus: Paris, Texas.3
![Wim Wenders operating a sketchy camera rig from the backseat while Robby Müller looks on Wim Wenders operating a sketchy camera rig from the backseat while Robby Müller looks on](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F22a3c19c-65e2-4faf-aa10-f182c6532af2_1000x665.jpeg)
There is something cozy about Alice in the Cities, with its photo booths, jukeboxes, and polaroids. In this analogue world, sharing something means giving it away, which is not necessarily true for us. Will Alice and Winter cherish the pictures they have of each other more than we could today because of their uniqueness? It is impossible to say, but worth pondering.
And yet, for all its charms, analogue technology can be cruel. Before 2014, Alice was all but dead. Only a hundred or so prints were made for distribution when it was released, and the negative was so scratched and torn as to be unwatchable. Thanks to digital restoration, the film has not only been saved, but reframed in the 1:66:1 widescreen formatting that Wenders and Müller originally intended.
Digital technology is by no means future proof either. The problems of cultural archiving may simply be insurmountable, but I am glad that Alice in the Cities has a second lease on life.
Alice in the Cities (1974)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Cinematography by Robby Müller
Starring Rüdiger Vogler as Philip Winter,
and Yella Rottländer as Alice van Dam.
Watch it on The Criterion Channel.
In 1982 Wenders released Chambre 666, a documentary in which he asked directors such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, and Werner Herzog questions about the future of cinema. The main question was: “Is cinema a language about to get lost, an art about to die?” If Wenders turned the camera on himself in that film, I wonder if he would quote any parts of Winter’s monologue from this scene.
Wenders calls Polaroid photography “the last genius outburst of the analogue age.” Polaroids play an important role in the first half of Alice. While filming, Wenders and his crew were given a prototype of the SX-70—the first model in which the photo ejected and developed automatically—six months before it was sold to the public. Wenders had to sign papers saying he would not release the film before the camera went to market. They only had one prototype and a dozen packs of film, so they were extremely careful with it—in the scene where Alice takes a picture of Winter, Vogler is visibly anxious to make sure Rottländer handles it properly.
Winter says early in the film, “It just never shows what you saw!” This is literally true. With a regular camera, you frame it exactly how you want and it comes out looking more or less as expected. Even if it is a little different, you would not see the actual photo until much later when you developed it. But a polaroid photo was square, so it never quite looked like what you saw in the viewfinder. More importantly, it developed instantly, so you were able to compare the photo with what you were looking at. We are familiar with the latter problem today with our phone cameras.
The square polaroids meant that you made sure to frame your subject in the center, unlike in “real” photography, where the common advice is to avoid the middle—a concept taken from painting. Nowadays Instagram uses square photos as well. I wonder if squares are a photographic colloquialism—are they more casual, friendly, and shareable than wide shots? Wenders seems to think so: “They look better on your fridge.”
Claire Pijman has made a wonderful documentary called Robby Müller: Living the Light. The film uses lots of material from Müller’s private collection of photos and videos, as well as interviews with directors who worked with him (notably Wim Wenders, Jim Jarmusch, and Lars von Trier). I highly recommend it if you’re interested in learning more about him.