The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

126 Austin Chick
Chick: Yeah, I mean I remember that scene really clearly. And actually,
you’ve seen it recently. What’s the song that is stuck in his head? He tells the
story about getting in a fight with his girlfriend. And the whole time there’s
a song stuck in his head. It’s like “I’ve got a girl . . .”
The song is “I Got a Woman.” But I wanted to come back to this other
quote that you talked about. Because that quote, “The Yanks have colonized
our subconscious,” is mostly said about music. And it’s not a line
that’s said with malice or regret. In the context of the film it’s an open
admission of American influence on Wenders himself.
Chick: Yeah, definitely. They’re sitting in the bunker, the U.S. bunker, and
they pick up the phone, and they get an operator in the United States.
This is when East and West Germany were split, and critics had said
that this was the “German Easy Rider.” I thought after seeing it, “It’s
Easy Rider meets Cinema Paradiso.” Are any of those descriptions fair?
How would you describe it?
Chick: Easy Rider to a certain degree is a fair comparison, but it feels
like you know the Wenders version. I think in some ways it harkens back
more to Walker Evans, and to me that imagery feels very Walker Evans. A
lot of those shots of small towns—and didn’t they stop at a gas station at
one point? They’re getting gas and there’s this old man sitting there, and
there’s no dialogue exchange at all but the guy looks like he’s a forgotten
Walker character.
And there’s almost no dialogue for nearly thirty minutes. As a filmgoer
was that unusual or shocking or puzzling? Or were you willing to hang
with it?
Chick: It was probably the only art house theater in New Hampshire, and it
was in the town that I lived in. It was called the Winton Town Hall Theater,
and it showed a bunch of European films. So it wasn’t like I had never been
exposed to European films, films with that kind of pacing, but it was definitely
a different experience. That movie is ridiculously slow paced, glacially
paced, but to me, maybe it was because I had spent the last two months
hitchhiking around, I was in a place where I was used to a long period of