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.

Introduction by cinematographer Fred Murphy on Sunday, December 8th.