In this 16th episode of From Below, Christian Robert-Tissot takes us back to Wim Wenders’ foundational film. Released in 1974, Alice in the Cities is a luminous meditation on wandering and rootlessness.
WHAT ARE YOU TAKING PICTURES FOR? JUST LIKE THAT
Wenders’ first original screenplay, Alice in the Cities inaugurates the trilogy devoted to wandering, which also includes Wrong Move, made the following year, and Kings of the Road, released in 1976. “Why are you taking pictures for?” asks a young American boy to Philip, the German reporter who photographs the dusty gas station where he has stopped. He replies, “Just like that.” To the simple question of a child who lives in the present moment comes the vague answer of an adult who photographs everything, searching for meaning.
The main character, Philip Winter, is a journalist struggling with life and with creation, wandering through America without managing to make sense of what he sees. His compulsive photography is no longer about documentation; it is a way of clinging to what surrounds him, as if an emotional fissure separated him from reality. His chance encounter with Alice – a sharp and perceptive young girl abandoned by her mother – introduces a new dynamic between the disillusioned adult and this child who questions the world. They will continue the journey together, heading toward Germany.
The roads, motels, and train stations turn the film into the mirror of a world in transit. Wenders’ fourth feature film and his first critical success, Alice in the Cities explores malaise with a kind of restraint, tinged with a melancholy deepened by the choice of black and white. The character of Philip Winter appears as the director’s alter ego. Wenders would later express his deep attachment to this film, which he considered his true first work.
Carried by Yella Rottländer, its young lead, and Rüdiger Vogler, Wenders’ frequent collaborator, the film foreshadows themes that would come to permeate Wim Wenders’ filmography, notably in the celebrated Paris, Texas, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984: a cinema of travel and inner quest. His characters seek to reconnect with the world and with others, faced with a pervasive sense of loss and fragmentation.
Forty years later, the line borrowed by the Geneva-based artist Christian Robert-Tissot still resonates. Long before smartphones, before the billions of images we produce each day to fill a void or confirm our presence, Wenders had already sensed this frenzy of seeing. Thus, this dialogue reflects how, today, reality slips away from us, in a world saturated with images where taking photographs often amounts more to an automatic gesture than a conscious act.
Discover the complete From Below series by Christian Robert-Tissot, launched in December 2020. The message on the illuminated sign is renewed every three months until the official opening of the Plaza Centre Cinema at the end of 2026.