The Construction of Images: Wim Wenders’ Kings of the Road

“For the first time, I see myself as someone who’s gone through a certain time, and that time is my story.”
– Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), Kings of the Road

Across its brief evolutionary time scale, the cinema has buried traces of at least a few near-cataclysmic events in its fossil record. It seems evident that we are living in one such period now, as streaming platforms lure audiences away from the communal space of the theatre and into atomised domestic zones, trading the occasionally disruptive presence of strangers for more perilous, self-inflicted distractions.

Im Lauf der Zeit¹ (Kings of the Road, Wim Wenders, 1976) offers a window into another such moment, 50 years in the past: a time when TV ownership had attained a critical mass in the villages scattered along the eastern border of West Germany, as in so many other places in the world, and local independent theatres – no longer holding a monopoly on visual entertainment – were on their last legs, if not already in the process of shutting down.²

In Kings of the Road, this concept of a fragmented experience of the world is not merely confined to the question of cinema’s future. It is also reflected in the experiences and dispositions of the film’s protagonists: Bruno Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), a travelling cinema repairman who lives a solitary life driving from town to town in his converted furniture van; and Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler), a demoralised, newly separated psycholinguist who finds himself Bruno’s passenger, having driven his own car headlong into the Elbe River. Neither character is given much in the way of explicit backstory – even if aspects of each man’s upbringing, familial relationships and self-regard come to light as the film progresses – but much about their personalities is revealed in the way they communicate with one another, often with looks and gestures rather than words.

While shooting his previous feature, Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move, 1975), Wenders had encountered a large number of locations across Germany that he wished to film without the constraint of having to fit them within an existing script. “I decided to make my next project a travelling film,” the director recounts, “where I could put in anything I liked [and] where I would have the freedom of making up the story as we – literally – went along.”³ As such, Kings of the Road was a largely improvised production, with only the loosest narrative framework; filming took place from July to October 1975 along “a route with over eighty cinemas … just along the border with East Germany, between Lüneburg and Passau,”⁴ with scenes devised in a sometimes-haphazard way by Wenders, Vogler, Zischler, cameraman Robby Müller and assistant director Martin Hennig late at night before shooting began in a new location the following morning.⁵

In seeking to capture these ephemeral places, Kings of the Road maintains a remarkable emphasis on the materiality of things and the passage of time. Speaking of his embrace of various formats over his career, Wenders has explained that he “always felt that you could best capture the spirit of your own time … with the tools of that time.”⁶ Indeed, there are few narrative films that are quite so specifically concerned with the physical building blocks of cinema. Wenders announces this intention from the outset: the film’s opening credits commence with a list of technical specifications (“in black/white, Widescreen 1:1.66” – here, a rectangular box with those dimensions appears around the text – “and production sound”) followed by the times and locations of shooting. 

Film, as it exists in the world of Kings of the Road, likewise manifests less via the magic of the moving image than through the cumbersome machines that populate Bruno’s numerous visits to projection booths. They clank and whirr; digest and then spit out reams of plastic; beam light out through upstairs windows; or sit stationary, waiting to be disassembled and put together again.⁷ 

Despite the evident care he takes with this equipment, however, Bruno’s own relationship towards the movies themselves appears ambivalent. In the one sequence wherein he attends a film as an audience member, having arrived at the Post-Lichtspiele in Viechtach in the hope of a date, it becomes all too apparent that these cinemas are suffering not just from financial constraints but from the fare that’s available to them – in this case, one among many of the indistinguishable softcore-porn flicks that dominated popular German cinema in the 1970s,⁸ badly projected to a nearly empty theatre of scattered, disinterested patrons. When the film print is ruined, Bruno “makes” a film out of some of its frames, a seven-second loop that distils the popular cinema of the day as he sees it: a parade of instant gratification; sex, violence, destruction.

In Kings of the Road’s penultimate sequence, Bruno speaks to the proprietor of a cinema (Franziska Stömmer) who explains why she has chosen to close the cinema that her father fought so hard to keep open in his lifetime: “I won’t be forced to show films where people stagger out stunned and rigid with stupidity, films that kill any joy of life inside them and destroy any feeling for themselves and the world,” she insists. “My father wanted this town to go on having a theatre. Me too. But the way it is now, it’s better to have no theatre.” 

That battle of art, joy of life and feeling against the destructive and stultifying forces of capital is, needless to say, at least as formidable in 2026 as it was 50 years ago. “It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, if a user is on their phone or cleaning their room,” writes Will Tavlin about the age of Netflix slop. “What matters is that it’s on, and that it stays on.”⁹ And yet, there is something deeply moving about how Bruno keeps the flame flickering at his own culturally bleak moment in time: about how, for instance, he steps in and tries to salvage the projection of the cheap-and-nasty film at the Post-Lichtspiele so that the show can go on; and about how he continues to drive around to these little cinemas as they teeter on the edge of the abyss, perhaps because it’s all he knows, or perhaps in the hope of better days to come. 

Im Lauf der Zeit / Kings of the Road (1976 West Germany 175 mins)

Prod: Wim Wenders Dir: Wim Wenders Scr: Wim Wenders Phot: Robby Müller Ed: Peter Przygodda Mus: Axel Lindstädt

Cast: Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Lisa Kreuzer, Rudolf Schündler, Marquard Bohm, Franziska Stömmer

Endnotes