Paris, Texas

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Movie
German title Paris, Texas
Original title Paris, Texas
Country of production France , Germany
original language English
Publishing year 1984
length 147 minutes
Age rating FSK 6 (cinema
version) FSK 12 (purchase version)
Rod
Director Wim Wenders
script LM Kit Carson ,
Sam Shepard
production Don Guest
music Ry Cooder
camera Robby Muller
cut Peter Przygodda
occupation
synchronization

Paris, Texas is a German-French feature film directed by Wim Wenders from 1984 . LM Kit Carson wrote the script for the drama , which was filmed in English, based on a script by the playwright Sam Shepard . Harry Dean Stanton took on the leading role . The German premiere in cinemas took place on January 11, 1985. By the end of 1985 there were around 1.1 million moviegoers in the Federal Republic of Germany .

action

Travis, the main character of the film, wanders neglected and aimlessly through a wide Texan landscape. Almost dying of thirst and looking for something to drink, he stops at a lonely bar, takes a handful of ice cubes and collapses. A doctor uses a business card to locate Travis' brother Walt in Los Angeles . He travels to pick up his brother, who has been missing for four years.

But Travis does not speak, eat or sleep. He also refuses to fly back to Los Angeles on a plane, so the two brothers have to travel by car. Only gradually does Travis begin to speak and eat again.

At his brother Walt's house, his wife Anne and Travis' son Hunter are waiting for the brothers to return. Hunter was three years old at the time of his father's disappearance. He grew up in the care of Walt and Anne and regards them as his parents. The truth about his real parents was never withheld from him, but the boy approaches his father, who suddenly reappears, only hesitantly.

Travis learns that Hunter's mother Jane sends money to Hunter from a bank in Houston on a specific day each month . He decides to find Jane through the bank. When he lets Hunter in on his plans, he wants to accompany him. Without saying anything to Walt and Anne, they both set off for Houston.

Jane is now working in a peep show : in a cabin with a mirrored wall, only transparent for paying men, she presents herself, listens, and undresses. Travis, who doesn't want to reveal himself yet, visits her cabin. But he can hardly bring himself to say something and returns to Hunter. You stay in a hotel.

The next day, Travis returns to Jane's establishment. He visits her cabin again without revealing himself. He's talking to her on a room phone that she doesn't recognize his voice. Little by little, Jane understands that the story the invisible stranger tells her is her own, and that the stranger must be Travis.

Travis tells the story of their love, which was so great for him that he “would have thought it unthinkable”: The young, barely 18-year-old girl and the significantly older Travis live in a trailer and seem to love each other without limits. His love becomes so overwhelming that he can no longer stand to be separated from her. When he quits his job to spend more time with her, it leads to money problems. He starts working again and quits again. Jane starts to worry as Travis becomes more and more jealous.

When Jane is expecting a child, the relationship seems to go into balance. Travis, now sure of her loyalty, goes back to work. But after Hunter is born, Jane changes. She becomes increasingly depressed, trapped, and suffers from nightmares. Travis can't please her anymore and he starts to get drunk on a regular basis. When Jane tells Travis of a dream in which she runs away, his fear of loss returns more violently than ever and he fears Jane and Hunter's escape. He ties a bell to Jane's foot so that she cannot run away unnoticed. One night she stuffs a stocking into the bell and steals away, but when she almost escapes, the stocking falls off the bell. Travis wakes up, catches her and ties her up. Then he lies down on the bed, hears her and the child screaming, dreams of escaping from his desperate situation into a desert landscape, and finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, his bed and trailer are on fire, his wife and child are gone and he runs away. He has not seen Jane or Hunter since.

The couple does not reunite; the encounter through the mirrored wall remains. But Travis tells Jane where to meet Hunter. From the hotel parking lot, Travis watches as Jane and her son Hunter embrace at the hotel room window. Then he drives away.

Reception and effect

The film premiered on May 19, 1984 in competition at the Cannes International Film Festival . In the following time it was shown at several other festivals, including the Toronto Film Festival and in Germany at the Hof International Film Festival . On September 19, 1984, Paris, Texas hit French cinemas , November 9, US, and West German theaters on January 11, 1985 . In the USA, the film grossed 2,164,507 US dollars in its first theatrical release .

Almost all of the critics received the film positively. The American Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times 1984 that Paris, Texas was a film with the kind of "passion and willingness to experiment" that was more common fifteen years ago than in the film industry today. German-speaking critics were also taken with Paris, Texas . The lexicon of international films praised: “A film aesthetically captivating and emotionally rousing synthesis of genre film and European auteur cinema as a realistic image of America, road movie, love story and mythical allegory equally believable and fascinating.” Dieter Wellershoff, however, wrote in Die Zeit : “The actual scandal of the film is its central message that children belong to their biological mothers, no matter how unmotherly they have behaved. Couldn't we learn from Brecht in the ' Caucasian Chalk Circle ' that the children belong to the maternal women and not under all conditions of their mother? "

The band Texas was named after the independent film , the band Travis after the main character of the film.

Awards

At the 1984 Cannes International Film Festival , the most important film festival alongside the Berlinale and the Venice Film Festival, the film received the main prize, the Palme d'Or . He was also awarded the FIPRESCI Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury .

The German Film Prize won Paris, Texas as Best Feature Film in silver. Robby Müller received the German Camera Prize in the Camera Feature Film category . It also won the Bavarian Film Prize in the Best Camera category . Wim Wenders won the René Clair Prize at the David di Donatello award. The film received the Fotogramas de Plata Prize, the Sant Jordi Award and the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Prize for Best Foreign Film , and the Danish Bodil for Best European Film .

At the 1985 BAFTA Awards , the film won the Best Director category and was also nominated for Best Picture , Best Score , and Best Adapted Screenplay . He received the ALFS Award at the London Critics Circle Film Awards . Paris, Texas was also nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film but was beaten by David Lean's trip to India . In 1985, Paris, Texas was named Best Foreign Film by the French Syndicat Français de la Critique de Cinéma .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

production

Argos Films , Channel Four Films and Road Movies Filmproduktion produced the road movie .

Product placement

For the production of the feature film, a product placement contract was concluded with a cigarette manufacturer in the amount of DM 60,000, which provided for the brand to be presented exclusively by the main character. The brand should always be highlighted positively. According to the text of the contract, “settings in which product packs are shown with overfilled ashtrays ... should be avoided”. The cigarette name had to be completely and clearly recognizable for at least 45 seconds.

Dispute about the cinema release

The original plan was that Paris, Texas should open in West German cinemas on September 28, 1984. The production company Road Movies Filmproduktion and the film distribution, Filmverlag der Autor , of which Wenders had been a member since it was founded in 1971, had agreed to start with forty film copies in smaller cinemas. After the film received awards and critical acclaim in Cannes, Wenders found a different strategy to be more promising. He wanted to lend at least eighty copies and have the film shown in larger cinemas. The experience with his earlier film Der Stand der Dinge also played a role, which had won the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival but was not a box office success when it was distributed by the film publisher. The film publisher, on the other hand, took into account the success in Cannes, but only planned to increase it to 64 copies. It also played a role that Wenders' previous films did not achieve the good box office results that were hoped for.

At the beginning of August 1984, Wenders and his producer Sievernich canceled the distribution contract with the authors' film publisher. In return, the Wenders film publisher issued an injunction to prohibit public statements. An interview with Wenders in the ZDF telecast aspects was then broadcast without sound.

Road Movies was looking for a new distributor and found it in the Tobis Film company . However, the film publisher was not prepared to give up the distribution rights. Meanwhile, the film was shown in foreign cinemas with great success. Bus trips were organized from West Germany to performances in Switzerland . At the film festival in Hof , Paris, Texas was shown in English for the first time in West Germany.

In November 1984 the producer Sievernich subordinated the main shareholder of the film publisher Rudolf Augstein to a strategy of destruction. Hark Bohm , Uwe Brandner and Hans W. Geißendörfer then took a position for the film publisher and asked Wenders to give in. Nevertheless, Brandner and Geißendörfer left the authors' film publishing house in December 1984. Wenders also left the film publishing company, and Rudolf Augstein also sold his shares to Theo Hinz in 1985 , under whom the film publishing company increasingly distanced itself from its original goals and became more commercial.

On January 11, 1985, the film publishing house of the authors finally brought the film into the German cinemas after Wenders had declared that he did not want to stand in the way of the cinema release. The film saw 1,129,600 German viewers in 1985.

synchronization

The German dubbed version was created for the cinema premiere in 1984.

role actor German Dubbing voice
Travis Henderson Harry Dean Stanton Hilmar Thate
Jane Henderson Nastassja Kinski Nastassja Kinski
Walt Henderson Dean Stockwell Christian Quadflieg
Anne Henderson Aurore Clement Cordula Trantow
Doctor Ulmer Bernhard Wicki Bernhard Wicki
Screaming man on bridge Tom F. Farrell Michael Habeck

DVD and Blu-ray

The film has been released in three different versions. On DVD, on Blu-ray and in a special edition (Arthaus Premium) from Arthaus Filmvertrieb. All three versions are sold with an age rating from 12 years.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Certificate of Release to Service for Paris, Texas . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , December 2007 (PDF; test number: 55 125 V / DVD / UMD).
  2. ↑ Many have highlighted her acting performance in the minute-long close-up of her face in Travis' narration; B. Christiane Peitz: Wim Wenders and the sand of things . In: Der Tagesspiegel . August 13, 2010.
  3. ↑ https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/wim-wenders-zum-75-geburtstag-hof-gratierter-dem-preistraeger,S7d00NP
  4. ↑ IMDb Box office
  5. ↑ Roger Ebert
  6. ↑ Dieter Wellershoff : Pious Lies . In: The time . February 15, 1985.
  7. ↑ Aktuell '89 (The Lexicon of the Present). Page 229, ISBN 3-611-00035-3 .
  8. ↑ In the palm frenzy . In: Der Spiegel . Edition 33/1984. August 13, 1984.
  9. ↑ a b A Battle for Paris, Texas . The mirror. Issue 2/1985.
  10. ↑ Hymn sounds . The mirror 41/1984.
  11. ↑ insidekino.de
  12. ^ Paris, Texas. List of voice actors. German synchronous database;