Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Alice in the Cities
1974 · Wim Wenders · Alice in the Cities on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Philip complain about his own Polaroids. (setting)
He keeps shooting instant photographs and keeps insisting none of them show what he actually saw, piling up a glove compartment of failed pictures.
Payoff: A man whose job is turning the world into words can't even trust his own camera to do it.
Watch people stay small against landscapes and glass. (camera)
Robby Müller favors long takes and a watchful distance, keeping figures small within highway strips, terminals, and reflective windows rather than dominating the frame.
Payoff: The camera lets you look instead of directing your eye, which matches a story about a man learning to see again.
Watch the elevated train glide above the river. (setting)
The Wuppertal Schwebebahn appears as a recurring image, a train suspended and moving smoothly with nowhere in particular to arrive.
Payoff: Motion without arrival is the film's clearest picture of where these characters actually are.
Listen for American rock playing against a German setting. (sound)
A Chuck Berry concert and music by the German band Can put live American pop culture directly inside the German landscape Philip is trying to reach.
Payoff: You can hear a whole argument about imported cultural dreams without a word of dialogue explaining it.
Watch the search rely on one photo with no address. (structure)
Philip and Alice try to find her grandmother's house using only a single faded photograph, with no street name or town to go on.
Payoff: The quest is almost a joke as a plan, and the film plainly knows it. The relationship it forces matters more than finding the house.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch him check the Polaroid. It never shows what he saw. That's the whole film.