playlist #1
 

Posted on 14.10.2023

Every day, we will feature one or more tracks from a film by Wim Wenders, for whom music is an integral part of the story.

On the road again by Canned Heat from Alice in the Cities.

 
“Well, I'm so tired of crying/But I'm out on the road again”, sings the haunting falsetto of Alan Wilson, leader and occasional singer of the American blues band Canned Heat. It is hard not to kick things off with what could serve as an anthem for the road movie by Wenders. In the autumn of 1968, Canned Heat went on a major European tour, popularising their hit single and appearing on the German TV programme Beat Club. Was the twenty-three-year-old Wim in front of his television set then?

In Alice in the Cities, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), roaming around an America that disappoints him, listens to the song on his car radio. The movie is also rich with other musical selections. The protagonist goes to a Chuck Berry concert where we can hear, thanks to archival footage, the hit tune Memphis, Tennessee, whose text is said to have inspired Wenders: it's about a man trying to find his six-year-old daughter... Another song, although it is more anecdotal is Psychotic Reaction by the garage rock band Count Five. Look closely: at the very beginning of the film, the man listening to the song standing against a jukebox (a “très Wenders” prop) is none other than Wim himself, putting his stamp on his film, in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock.

A. F.

SÉANCES

Alice in the Cities by Wim Wenders (Alice in den Städten, 1974, 1h52)
UGC Confluence Sun. 15 at 10.45am | Lumière Terreaux Wed. 18 at 4.15pm | Comoedia Fri. 20 at 11.15am | Pathé Bellecour Sat. 21 at 2.45pm