Wim Wenders: Songs from Along the Road
“One of the discoveries of the road movies was not only that you could travel and work and make a film at the same time, and improvise it, but that rock and roll could also be, in the true sense, a driving force.” — Wim Wenders
Looking back on the films of Wim Wenders, it’s easy to see that music has not only had a strong personal influence on the German director, but also plays an essential role in the kind of cinema he creates. The melancholy mise-en-scène and considered pacing of Wenders’s work allows music to seep into the heart of his films—from his existential road movies to his lovelorn character studies—and become almost as important as the stories themselves. As a lifelong lover of music, Wenders came of age in a time when his contemporaries were “reinventing rock and roll,” as he put it in a program on our release of Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy. And although he never trained as a musician, Wenders notes that the camera was, in a sense, his guitar—an instrument that enabled him to create that rock-and-roll ethos he loved so much.
In celebration of the supreme wealth of great music in Wenders’s work, we created the ultimate Wenders mixtape over on Spotify, which you can also enjoy in full below.
