Everywhere is Nowhere: Wrong Move

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if only you walk long enough.”¹

The avowed inspiration for Wim Wenders’ Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move, 1975) is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, a classic of German literature and the very model of a Bildungsroman. However, apart from the names of some characters, readers of the novel will find little in common with the film directed by Wenders and written by the future Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke. 

The novel’s Wilhelm leaves the home of his parents in the hope of making a career in the theatre. He will encounter many strange characters and have many adventures that will shape both his character and his understanding of the world. The film’s Wilhelm (Rüdiger Vogler) is told to leave the house by his mother (Marianne Hoppe), who hopes it may help him to gain the experience he needs to become a writer. He too will meet a diverse range of people, but at no point does he have a formative experience. The characters are continually moving, travelling by train, by car, by ferry or walking between urban spaces that have little or no personality – train stations, shopping centres, anonymous hotels – and generic rural landscapes that have even less. These seem to blur into one another and leave the impression of a dream vaguely remembered. Everywhere they go turns out to be another nowhere. In an interview, Wenders declares: “The landscapes of Wrong Move all have within them the potential to be beautiful, to be marvellous; but they only have the possibility of being so; because of history, these landscapes are horrible.”²

In the course of his wanderings, Wilhelm is forced to acknowledge that his method of writing is detached from reality: “When I write, I also close my eyes and see some things very clearly that I refused to see with my eyes open.” At first sight, this doesn’t seem to make much sense, and one of the characters even exclaims: “Everything strikes me as nonsensical.” On a closer inspection, things do make sense. Although it appears nowhere in the credits, Wrong Move comes across as an adaptation of Goethe through the lens of Lewis Carroll. Wilhelm is a grown-up version of Alice who travels through a world he doesn’t understand, simultaneously a Wonderland and a reflection through a glass darkly. 

Like Alice, Wilhelm meets different companions who also seem to wander aimlessly in a world that seems familiar, yet also vaguely menacing: they witness scenes of violence, hear shouting and gunfire, see smoke arising from nowhere. In some scenes, the travellers break into a run for no apparent reason. At one point Bernhard (Peter Kern), an Austrian poet who joins the group for a while, invites them to stay at the house of his rich uncle. Once there, Bernhard admits that he got “the wrong house and the wrong uncle.” The poem he recites declares that he feels “too vast a space between me and the world.” That is the space inhabited by the characters of this film. Not a world they do not belong to, but a world where the space is almost empty, haunted by phantasms, illusions and dreams that nobody apart from the dreamer can possibly see. We may wonder, in fact, if even the dreamer can see anything at all. After spending their first night in the house, everybody tries to remember what it was they dreamt about the night before. In Bernhard’s memory, the dream is something he watches as if it were a film, not an experience he actually lives through.

In fact, the whole itinerary of the journey comes about largely by accident. The place where everything starts is chosen at random. It could have been anywhere, or rather any nowhere, as Wenders himself acknowledged: “I looked at a map of Germany for a place in the north, and there was a little town I chose purely for the sake of its name: Glückstadt. [This translates roughly as ‘Luckyville’.] And the film was to end at Germany’s highest point, the Zugspitze. A lot of my films were inspired by poring over maps.”³ It is here, at the end, as Wilhelm contemplates the peaks covered in snow, that we find the film’s most recognisable image. This final shot looks like an homage to the iconic 1818 painting “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. We see Wilhelm from behind, as we do the dreamer in the painting. Stretched out far below him is an all-but-identical misty mountain landscape. He wears not a darkly Byronic frock coat, but a drab mud-coloured trench coat. In between him and the landscape is an iron railing painted in garish shades of red and blue. The shot is a spectacular fusion of the Romantic and the mundane. As always in Wrong Move, Reality has been filtered through Art.

All through the film, we get references to the reproduction of reality through optical means: the characters pass several cinemas; Wilhelm meets the woman he may fall in love with in front of a photographic camera; later on, two people ask him to film them with an amateur cine-camera. The world as seen through different lenses is distant and may well be deceptive. As before, this world reminds us of the universe that Alice travels through in Lewis Carroll’s books:

All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera glass. At last he said “You’re traveling the wrong way,” and shut up the window, and went away.⁴

Falsche Bewegung/Wrong Move (1975 Germany 103 min)

Prod: Bernd Eichinger, Peter Genée Dir: Wim Wenders Scr: Peter Handke, based on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Phot: Robby Müller Mus: Jürgen Knieper Ed: Peter Przygodda, Barbara von Weitershausen

Cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Hans Christian Blech, Hanna Schygulla, Nastassja Kinski, Peter Kern, Ivan Desny, Marianne Hoppe 

Endnotes