The State of Things
Director: Wim Wenders
1982 / 121min / DCP
German filmmaker Friedrich (Patrick Bauchau) is holed up at a hotel on the storm-lashed Portuguese coast, using American funding to shoot a shoestring budget post-apocalyptic thriller, though mostly he winds up playing a waiting game with cast and crew (including Warhol star Viva, Sam Fuller, Isabelle Weingarten, and co-writer Robert Kramer) after their producer disappears without a trace. An intermediate production made during the difficult shoot of Wenders’s 1982 Hammett for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios in the US, sumptuously shot in black and white by legendary DP Henri Alekan, The State of Things is Wenders’s meditation on the complicated co-dependence of the European and American film industries.
“The State of Things is as perfect a summation of our time as it was of 1982—then, as now, a time of artistic expatriation, abandonment, and a film industry in crisis. When a movie crew (an all-almost star cast in beautiful black and white) is stranded on location in Portugal, their director must fly to Los Angeles to confront their producer, a man circling the drain in an Airstream trailer he drives continually around Hollywood.” —A.S. Hamrah
Distributor: Janus Films
Pre-screening conversation with author Nathan Gelgud and writer A. S. Hamrah on Saturday, November 14th
Book signing with Nathan Gelgud following the screening
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