The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty

Wim Wenders’ second feature film opens onto an aerial shot of a football match, largely obscured behind a massive ballooning title card appearing in brilliant yellow and orange typeface. Closing in on the players, we watch the precise movements of their bodies as they respond to the demands of the game. One kneels to retie his cleat, another catches the ball against his chest before guiding it across the field. Our protagonist, goalkeeper Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss), appears only as the camera tracks to the far right of field, where he stands solitary, pacing and adjusting his socks. A call of “Offside!” is heard from off-screen. Moments later, Bloch (an apt name for a goalkeeper) seems almost in a daze as the ball wooshes past him and into the net. He responds by inciting a fight, shouting at the referee that the goal he made no effort to block was “clearly offside”. After being ousted from the match for his violence, Bloch takes a streetcar into Vienna, where he drifts through bars, hotels, and cinemas, commits a murder, and retreats to a small town on the Austrian border to hide in plain sight. 

Adapted from Peter Handke’s 1970 novel of the same name, Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, 1972) takes Handke’s already sparse language and pares it down even further in the screenplay. The third person perspective of Handke’s novel keeps a detailed record of Bloch’s thoughts and actions. In absence of this, we are placed outside of Bloch rather than inside his subjectivity, thus heightening the burden of interpretation. Arthur Brauss’s stony face, appearing ironic and impassive at one moment, then perplexed and agitated at another, seems to resist all inquiry, and his dialogue with others regularly seems so removed from the telos of conversation as to be rendered almost incomprehensible. From this vantage point, to attempt to interpret Bloch’s experiences or motivations for action is akin to inducing a state of paranoia. 

Upon being ejected from the football match, Bloch first asks a coach for the daily paper and then heads to the cinema. These sources of images, speech, and text mediate the world for Bloch but make few demands on him, and he returns to them more faithfully than to any character – perhaps with the exception of Hertha (a past lover played by Kai Fischer). Gloria (Erika Pluhar), a cinema cashier who sells tickets from behind a pane of glass, permits him entry at a price. In the cinema, from a seat in the back with extra legroom, he observes a readymade narrative without having to take part. The supercilious usher with whom he nearly comes to blows calls the police on Bloch after ousting him from the theatre for taking a nap. The officer asks for his papers while Bloch is contemplating the rotating bus maps outside, which are kept safe behind their own pane of glass like villages in a snow globe. The goalkeeper launches his assaults upon the cashier and the usher, the guardians of the image who restrict and impose limits on his access. 

Goalkeeper’s interpretive difficulties are reflected in the surrounding critical commentary, which sometimes asserts as fact what the film neither confirms nor denies. One such instance takes place after Bloch’s first visit to the cinema, as he is checking into a hotel. Is the football goal that Bloch watches on the lobby television the same as the one he just lived, as Robert Phillip Kolker suggests,¹ or is it another game entirely? Bloch himself seems not to know what to make of things either. When a previous patron alerts him that the telephone booth he’s about to use is out of service, Bloch’s response is one of disbelief until he tries it for himself. This confusion and mistrust in the face of communication recurs throughout the film. His attempts at connection mirror the work of a goalkeeper, who does not “play the game” so much as watch and anticipate the movements of the other players. In the beginning, Bloch turns to violence after mistaking a conceded goal as “offside”. Later, with Gloria, he resorts “to physical violence in the face of the breakdown of the ability to communicate meaningfully through language.”² The morning after they sleep together, Gloria talks to him about airplanes and postcards from America. Their conversation floats at the surface: they are speaking at, rather than with, each other. When he drops a pile of American coins on the table, Gloria asks if he just said something. How can a voice be mistaken for change? Bloch grows increasingly restless. When Gloria lies down on the bed and attempts a seduction with her fashionable noose, he strangles her instead, and the shot fades to black.

Bloch wakes up in a fetal position on the floor next to her lifeless body. He proceeds to wipe his fingerprints off the various objects he’s held: the utensils, the coffee cup, the sugar dish. Efficient but not fastidious at the scene of the crime, he forgets to take back the American coins which peek out from beneath the morning paper. America plays the foil in Bloch’s disappearing act, as a later headline reveals that these coins will be what incriminates him. Goalkeeper was the first of Wenders’ films to use a script, and a second camera was kept for the sole purpose of shooting objects. This created what Wenders referred to as a “parallel film, a film of objects, no story.”³ The objects, then, become another of Bloch’s interlocutors, even while they threaten to obliterate him. 

In the Jungle, the Mighty Jungle, the Lion Sleeps Tonight!

Away from Vienna, the residents of the border town Bloch flees to speak mainly of death and necessity, which are not so different. Death is everywhere in Goalkeeper. It is present in the many banal tragedies which afflict the town: a deceased neighbour’s body is left outside and the stench of it thickens the air; the body of a missing, mute schoolboy is discovered floating face down in the river; a child is crushed to death by falling pumpkins which, in a later scene, appear clustered on the side of the road – Cucurbita as memento-mori. Death is also present in the way Bloch drifts through the world, embodying the pervasive negation of a man who, in his all-encompassing anxiety, begins to take on the character of a living vortex. 

While his interactions with Hertha are subject to the same failed communication that colours all his relations, there remains a trace of that unmistakable tenderness between lovers who knew each other long ago. Bloch approaches this with a characteristic mix of hesitation and advance, often alienating her in the process. The two scenes where they are together in the kitchen of Hertha’s inn follow a similar trajectory: Hertha is busy with the quotidian while Bloch paces around restlessly, she gets fed up and demands an explanation (“What’s wrong? What’s eating you?”) which he evades, and there is a failed attempt at erotic intimacy. In the second instance, Bloch misses or rejects Hertha’s hint at seduction, instead opting to walk none other than a police officer home in the rain after he appears at the window to ask for an umbrella. Bloch listens while the officer describes how he anticipates a perpetrator’s next move by watching the eyes and the legs – not unlike a goalkeeper. But there’s been less smuggling since they mined the border, and with less to do, he’s losing his concentration. The interpretive accuracy of the police officer and the goalkeeper are both predicated on their ability to work. 

As he knows from observing the developments in his murder case in the daily paper, a kind of death is coming for Bloch too. While not literal (capital punishment was formally abolished in Austria in 1968), Bloch’s arrest would solidify his removal from a world he is already estranged from and foreclose the future – yet it’s unclear whether this is something he’s evading or courting. In another instance of misrecognition, when a sketch of the suspect appears in the paper, the young maid with whom Bloch has kept up an ongoing flirtation is unable to recognise his likeness. 

America as enigma, alterity, or “fantasy object”, as Laurent Shervington puts it,⁴ is a recurring motif in Wenders’ filmography and haunts the material and sonic world of Goalkeeper: the truck carrying a shipment of Coca-Cola to the inn, the American music coming out of myriad jukeboxes and radios, Gloria’s postcard collection, the 6 a.m. Pan Am to Rio De Janeiro. What meaning is there to be found outside of commerce, what identity outside one’s profession? What can be spoken about? While walking back to his Gusthof after his first visit to Hertha at her Border Inn, Bloch encounters the school custodian chopping wood outside its sole classroom. He laments the lack of adequate facilities: “No wonder the kids can’t even talk properly when they leave school.” The missing mute boy could not cry out for help. 

From the opening sequence, the film’s visual language establishes Bloch’s alienated position by framing him alone at the net, in a daze, away from the rest of the players. After his sketch appears in the morning paper, the closing scenes evoke a sense of decisive and final exclusion. The bakery noisily shutters its blinds, the window Bloch is standing under slams shut with a sharp, metallic thud as he reads the headline, “Hot Lead in Gloria T. Murder Case,” and he walks up to a phone booth only to find the receiver has been ripped off. These channels of communication, fraught but nonetheless open, are being cut off as Bloch faces the inevitability of arrest. When a bus pulls up (it is the same driver who delivered him to the town), Bloch does not get on but opts instead to wander into a nearby football match. The conversation he has with a fellow spectator, a salesman, brings it full circle. Bloch tells him to try and keep his eye on the goalie, to which he responds, “I can’t look there long. My eyes are drawn back to the forward. It’s as if you were cross eyed.” For the length of the film, we do just as Bloch suggests, and the effect is indeed destabilising. If life is like a football game, to run with the given metaphor, Bloch has been ousted with a jolt and now paces around the perimeter, unsure how or why to re-enter, occasionally throwing rocks at those still playing. 

Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter/The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty (1972 West Germany/Austria 101 mins)

Prod: Peter Genée, Thomas Schamoni, Wim Wenders Dir: Wim Wenders Scr: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke Phot: Robby Müller Ed: Peter Przygodda Mus: Jürgen Knieper

Cast: Arthur Brauss, Kai Fischer, Erika Pluhar, Libgart Schwarz, Marie Bardischewski, Michael Toost, Bert Fortell, Edda Köchl, Mario Kranz, Ernst Meister Rosl Dorena, Rudi Schippel

Endnotes