The German Federal Art Hall (Bundeskunsthalle) in Bonn is honoring renowned filmmaker Wim Wenders with a comprehensive retrospective exhibition celebrating his 80th birthday. The exhibition, titled "W.I.M. The Art of Seeing," offers a deep dive into the life and work of one of Germany's most internationally acclaimed directors, revealing much about both his artistic evolution and the transformation of Germany itself since World War II.
Films don't always translate well to museum settings. Accustomed to wandering and hunting for visual prey like predators, viewers must sit still for extended periods on hard benches or, if lucky, in bean bags that give one the body tension of a jellyfish and look correspondingly unflattering. The cave-like atmosphere is missing, the community of moviegoers is absent, and there's no popcorn. If you want to showcase film as art, it really only works in a cinema. Nevertheless, the Federal Art Hall has decided to honor the very famous director Wim Wenders on his 80th birthday with a classical exhibition.
Wenders himself guides visitors through the exhibition as a voice in the audio guide, presenting multiple layers of his work simultaneously - preparatory materials and filming paraphernalia, set photographs, film clips, his own and others' commentary, contextual wall texts, reception history, and in the final room, trophies and awards. In an immersive installation, visitors can watch excerpts from 24 films on floor cushions. The exhibition, conceived by the Federal Art Hall in collaboration with the German Film Institute & Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main and the Wim Wenders Foundation, proceeds largely chronologically with one notable exception.
Right at the beginning, even before the previously unseen youth images and early works of Wim Wenders, visitors encounter the famous scene where Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander, as angels in the black-and-white Berlin of 1987, walk side by side in long coats. "Wings of Desire" (originally "Der Himmel über Berlin") is certainly Wenders' best-known film, and it captures something essential. Right next to it, visitors can see footage shot from a helicopter flying over West Berlin and along the Berlin Wall, chartered by the British Army since private flights weren't permitted in the Cold War-encapsulated city.
The exhibition reveals aerial views of the Wall strip, Berlin courtyards, and tenement buildings that are still there today, just with different people living in them. Then something strange happens - it's as if an abyss opens up on the wall and pulls everything toward it with irresistible force: Otto Sander and Bruno Ganz, who have since died, the gray houses, Potsdamer Platz. It's the pull of time that reaches out from these images, making one realize that all of this has long since passed and can never be recovered: the typewriter-typed scripts and childhood memories from the rubble years, the unbroken belief in feeling and expression, in rock and roll, soul-searching and self-discovery, the longing for America and France.
The classic German post-war Weltschmerz (world-weariness) is becoming extinct, along with its blues guitars, 35mm prints, and beautiful old cars. Wim Wenders demonstrated early on a sense for places that would soon disappear, like the West Berlin of 1987. "I can't find Potsdamer Platz," says the then 86-year-old Curt Bois as he wanders across the wasteland of the former metropolitan life junction, cut through by the Wall and cleared away. "This can't be it." The irony is that today, you can't find the Potsdamer Platz from the film either.
Transience is a major motif for director and photographer Wim Wenders, who is passionate about Palermo, Lisbon, and Havana - nostalgic cities. In Berlin, the change is so extreme that "Wings of Desire" may stand paradigmatically for German history marked by shocks and upheavals. Born as the son of a doctor in Düsseldorf on August 14, 1945, three months after the end of the war in Europe and one week after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as he emphasized at the press conference for his retrospective, Wenders grew up in a devastated country.
Düsseldorf was ninety percent destroyed, he recalls, with only chimneys and rubble everywhere. Wenders spent his first years of life in the back rooms of his grandfather's pharmacy, which had remained halfway intact. "I grew up in ruins and discovered from my father's newspapers and my grandfather's encyclopedia that the world doesn't look like ours everywhere. That was a great discovery and the main driving force of my life," he explains. This is where his thirst for foreign air comes from.
In Paris, Wenders wanted to become a painter (the exhibition shows some of his paintings), spent a year absorbing film history through a thousand movies at the Cinématèque française, and was among the first students at the Munich Film and Television Academy. Along with other directors of the New German Cinema, Wenders founded the Filmverlag der Autoren (Authors' Film Publishing) in 1971. Three years later, he achieved his artistic breakthrough with "Alice in the Cities." In 1984, he won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for "Paris, Texas" - as the only German besides Volker Schlöndorff to this day.
Wenders has also filmed in Germany, but this Germany always looks foreign, while foreign countries take on something familiar in his work. Wenders' films are set in Texas, Japan, Sicily, New York, Australia, China, Cuba, in deserts and metropolises. Wenders is the director of journeys, road trips, wanderings, and getting lost. He is also one of the very few German directors who have found worldwide recognition. In Germany, it has often been criticized that these beautiful, picturesque Wim Wenders films sometimes have something embarrassing about them.
His 2023 film about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, "Perfect Days," thrilled critics, while his artist crisis film "Palermo Shooting," featuring Wenders' friend Campino from the band Die Toten Hosen, was criticized by reviewer Rüdiger Suchsland in 2008 for its "miserable dialogue quality." Wenders' 2023 Anselm Kiefer portrait was criticized by the FAZ as "highly pathetic," and his dialogues have been repeatedly criticized as "pseudo-philosophical." Yes, there's a tendency toward the sublime and nostalgic to be identified, especially in this exhibition, which bows deeply before the soon-to-be-eighty-year-old and allows few other companions to speak in their own voices.
The soft light, empty streets, contemplative men, handmade music - it all seems sometimes out of time. But what's wrong with that? Ry Cooder, Nick Cave, Pina Bausch, Lou Reed, Francis Ford Coppola - that so many good artists wanted to work with him must mean something. And now Wenders has arrived in Bonn, at the beginning. Two Polaroid photographs of the Rhine conclude the journey through life and work.
"I also grew up by the Rhine," says Wenders, "saw the river every day, know every castle by name." The two small-format pictures are enchantingly beautiful with their misty hills and high water levels. They were created in preparation for the film "Wrong Move," an adaptation of Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship that reverses its teachings, as Wenders explains. "While in Goethe, the travel movement across Germany is still one where Wilhelm Meister learns a lot, in our version he learns nothing at all. He arrives at the Zugspitze at the end and knows less than at the beginning."
"W.I.M. The Art of Seeing" runs until January 11, 2026, at the Federal Art Hall in Bonn, offering visitors a comprehensive look at one of cinema's most distinctive voices and his lifelong exploration of places, people, and the passage of time.
