User reviews

The thing about a film like "The State of Things", much like Wenders' earlier film "The Wrong Movement", is how too much introspection can really start to drag one down over time. Both pictures have the unfortunate distinction of talking themselves to death. This is not a film that gives you insight into life so much as insight into its specific characters. The value of this tends to decrease in the face of the fact that we never really get to know the characters in the first place. So this story seems to play like an ever-extending observation into enigmas, where each answer is really a question, like the cinematic equivalent of the "Jeopardy!" game show.

There are moments of true beauty, there's no denying that. But the beauty comes in the cinematography, the silences - not in the dialogue. The multiple cinematographers create a nice feel together, a fantastic series of images. "The State of Things" is almost always worth looking at, just not always engaging to fully experience. The ending is somewhat of a curiosity. Neither particularly disastrous nor completely convincing. It feels more like an artistic statement. And not one of great depth or meaning, either.

If you get a chance to see this 1982 film "The State of Things," take it. I had never heard of it and would not have come across it if I hadn't attended a multi-week festival of the films of director Wim Wenders at the IFC theater in New York, at which the director appeared several times for interviews and Q & A sessions.

"The State of Things" should be seen by anyone who loves, or even likes movies. I purposely say "movies" rather than "film" because you don't have to be a certified cinéaste to appreciate it. Plain old, popcorn-munching movie lovers will enjoy it as well. (Mr. Wenders, BTW, seems to be both. No contradiction there.)

Details of the plot can be found in other reviews, but in summary, an international cast and crew shooting a movie off of the coast of Portugal is left high and dry by the producer when they learn that there is not enough money available to continue the project. The director hasn't been able to reach the producer by phone so he flies to L.A. to talk to him and try to find out what's going on. This is where the plot thickens and you will have to see the movie to learn how it unfolds.

Besides extolling the merits of the movie itself, the ensemble cast and the director, my main motivation for writing this review is to praise the outstanding performance of Allen Goorwitz (a/k/a Allen Garfield) as the errant producer. Mr. Goorwitz is listed first in the acting credits (on IMDb) but he doesn't appear until about 45 minutes before the film ends and he is in every scene until the credits roll. It is well worth the wait. His portrayal of the character is a priceless tour-de-force.

This extraordinary character actor began his career learning his craft at The Actors Studio in New York where he studied with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. With those credits it is not surprising that he turned out to be one of those actors who "doesn't look like he's acting," a description usually associated with big name Method Actors such as Marlon Brando and James Dean.

If you are a movie lover who has ever yearned for a film that has "something different" while still being very accessible and not too artsy, put "The State of Things" at or near the top of your list. You will have to search for it but your efforts will be amply rewarded.

The cinematographer,real or fake,who would have been free to explore life and death, through narratives and images of his own conception, becomes an object of exploitation from the medium and it's economic concomitants.So he fools himself by abandoning his art to the conventions of economic necessity.Friedrich, and by implication Wenders,is afraid of the void that precedes the stories and the void that comes after.They both desire to integrate and at the same time they fear the outcome of this integration.The project of discriminating between false and authentic representation, between autonomy and manipulation or seduction is omnipresent in DER STAND DER DINGE.Against the threat of manipulation, Wenders romantically upholds the image as something pure and autonomous, an image that derive it's meaning through a network of signification but is meaningful in itself.Wenders task is "Wahrnehmen", that is to authenticate and to perceive at the same time by ascribing truth and beauty.Hence Wenders attempts to preserve something that is bound to disappear.His agenda is the recovery of vision.In Paul Cezanne's view,Wenders expresses a desire to hold the ephemeral: "Things are looking bad.You have to hurry if you want to see anything.Everything is disappearing".His films pay homage to his models who taught him the art of seeing:paintings of Edward Hopper and the par excellence Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, the photography of Walker Evans and August Sander.Yet his films increasingly become aware of the difficulty and even impossibility of combating the power of images through cinema.This is characterized by a paradoxical situation in which Wenders has to create images in order to battle them.Clearly this invocation of an older generation is an attempt to rid himself of a cultural legacy that he repudiates yet dares not fully confront.

In 1981, Raoul Ruiz made a little film called Territory - a group of people lost in a landscape, where without the signifiers of story or a map to guide them, we saw how they fell apart in all sorts of hierarchies and explanatory dogmas. The allegory was about us and the stories we make up. A central image was a map as a series of heads within heads, minds within minds - where the world starts. I've written a comment on IMDb.

At that time Wenders was waiting for money to come together for the Hammett film he was going to do for Coppola, floundering. Somehow he arranged to borrow Ruiz' cast & crew from that film to make this one in Portugal about the frustration. I had in fact marked this to see soon after Territory but other things intervened, I never took much to Wenders, so it was kind of forgotten.

As I return to it I find many of the same pros and cons of the man.

First the spin on Ruiz, playful, referential. The same people lost in a landscape but as they find their way to an abandoned seaside resort we realize they're actors in a film. They ran out of film to shoot with and have to wait as phonecalls are being made and the American producer is sought out. This lets Wenders capture the Hammett frustration - he shows a languishing with nothing to do.

More important though, without thesignifiers of story and images to mark time, real life opens for these people who now have to be themselves and not in a film. The German director in a speech says that 'stories are only found inside stories, real life is where there are no more stories', a banal aphorism like the French were doing years before - the obvious side of Wenders.

With nothing to do, we see how they're all embroiled in stories of their choosing, how they keep trying to imprint meaning, it's what we all do, foisting concept on things to explain existence. A log smashes through a window and the director has to quote from a book how it's a sign of evil, it cannot be just a log brought by the wind. Another one is awed that the ocean indicated on a globe is in fact what's right out his window - the real thing has been there all this time. A woman says that she's glad they're not filming, says it to the camera as she has her picture taken.

Ruiz would soon have all this in a magical timeflow, images of mind from inside of it, Wenders is looking for the ground beneath images that gives rise to them - the most difficult thing. So we have a second shift to now a Wenders film purely about the search, and what better place to unfold than Hollywood? We fly to the place that gives rise to images and drive around looking for the producer in ultimate control of them.

This was a great choice - now we can have just the city, the coming and going of things through the eyes. So what real life does he find beneath the stories?

A wandering around town looking for someone, the wandering as life. Some expertly photographed atmospheres of streets, but it numbs. Still the same lack of satisfaction so long as we depend on something out there to happen, outside of us.

So an emptiness but emptiness for Wenders is modern monotony instead of vital in the Buddhist understanding, lucid, receptive to things. It's what he missed again in his Ozu film after this. This isn't Zen as people sometimes say, Zen would be to see mundane life as the open ground of possibility, this merely records confines of unfulfillment: aimless driving around to cheat death.

Someone could say this all perfectly captures a malaise we know too well. But it does so as a coffee-table book about it, with cinematic time unspooled as only a style to hang around in. There's talk about Bogart films, a theater plays the Searchers - it fits nicely with that cinematic culture built by the French around reference, but it seems small stuff. And even so, what can be the use of saying life is aimless?

The finale with trying to spot unseen gunshots with a camera is difficult to watch, filming, trying to see, where death swoops from and the last breath as image. This because it could have been powerful - I think of the end of The Passenger. But how sophomoric it looks, how film school- ish in its reach of a great matter. Still it's better to confront this and decide than never to contemplate the thing.

Arguably Wim Wenders' best movie is a sum of his work and his artistry and also presents the haphazardness of film-making, photographed in beautiful black-and-white images; alone, the entrance sequence of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi film demonstrates what Wenders would Wenders himself could have done with such a project.

From the first time I saw it, this film resonated strongly on two levels; first, it is an excellent example of Wenders at his best: an almost dreamy progression of exactingly composed images, mysterious characters, a "story" which comes as close as film can to "truth", and for the cineastes in the audience, a complex dialogue with films of the past. But my second reason for loving this film is far more personal. As a teenager growing up in Hollywood during the early 1980s, I knew nothing about Wim Wenders or film history, but friends guided me to this film because of the soundtrack and the images at the end, inside an RV wandering aimlessly in Hollywood. This is, as far as I know, the first film to use either X or Joe Ely in the soundtrack. It also captures a lost city with amazing precision; almost every shot at the end contains some nostalgic element, from Tiny Naylor's drive-in to the Parisian Room, from Schwab's Pharmacy to the white smog in Laurel Canyon. This is a great film, but for Los Angelenos of my generation, it's a treasure-trove.

Between commercial successes like Paris Texas and Angels over Berlin, Wenders still manages to make the kind of seemingly irrelevant road movies such as Santiago and State of Things, that have made him the cult hero he is. Here a cheesy scifi B-movie is interrupted at a climatic scene to follow people just hanging around talking. Which is more cinematic is a question that comes back over and over again. Actively pursuing a life, no matter how mundane or screwed up, seems to be more rewarding than passively waiting to have someone else fulfill your fantasies, or so this film seems to hint. Good film for those still in love with non virtual reality.

This is painful for me to write since I am sure it will be misinterpreted. But I feel it is important to add an antidote to the many positive reviews here. First, be it known that I am a big fan of Wenders, which is the entire reason why I should seek out The State of Things and purchase it on DVD.

It was an enormous disappointment. First, the acting is a disgrace, almost from start to finish, across almost the entire cast. (I except the children.) Not just bad in the sense that I wished they could do better, but bad in the sense of obvious errors even an amateur should not make (mugging for the camera, flat tone, banal delivery, etc.). This is odd for a Wenders film, so it is not surprising to learn he borrowed the cast from another production.

Second, the music is annoyingly underdeveloped and cheesy in pseudo-porno mode. Third, Wenders lays on the "meaning" so thick and heavy that it takes no great intelligence to get the point... when there is one. And finally the plot is full of pointless moments, scenes extended long past their best before date and inanities.

As a fan of Wenders, none of this surprises me! That is because my love for his film-making is predicated on his ability to take risks, real risks, risks that can lead to a complete failure... and they regularly do! This also allows him to make utterly divine films like Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas. The End of Violence and Until The End of The world, flawed though they are, remain among my favourite celluloid experiences. Others still manage to be far more interesting than this effort (Lisbon Story, Alice in the Cities, The American Friend, even Land of Plenty and Faraway, So Close). Once you've seen all those other films you might want to grab this one, but only for one reason...

...the cinematography! Henri Alekan's work is, as always, truly divine. And completely wasted on this film, which I can only begrudgingly give three stars: two for his work and one for the finale, which contains 30 seconds of REAL film-making.

This is not a movie that's easy to understand, yet it easily makes you think. It smells of nostalgia and of things past and fading. The film that the film crew is shooting about survivors to a nuclear holocaust is a parallel to the director's own journey to collect money from his LA producer in order to continue the film. The movie is visually beautiful, full of the magic of black and white photography. It's also a movie that constantly speaks about itself, about the hardships of shooting black and white, and about the need for "a story" which the film itself seems to lack. It tries not to be a film, but to film life. Yet, in the ordinary and particular of everyday life it conveys the eternal and universal.

I have earlier seen Paris Texas, Until The End Of The World, The End Of Violence, Buena Vista Social Club and Wings Of Desire, films that well may be particular high lights in the filmography of Wim Wenders, and films that I remember with wondering but aknowledge. If The State Of Things is to set some standards for the rest of his film creations, I think I'll stop trying to understand him.

The reason for borrowing this film on DVD from the local library was the director's name and that it has been honored with The Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival. Even though I expected it to be a strange story, special, a study in pictures and with little dialogue, and by all means avant garde, I didn't think the quality of main elements would be this poor. The music mirrors the time era but is totally over exposed and annoying, all the way from the start. Then there's the acting and the banal way the actor's deliver their lines. Artificial. What's the intention? With a scenography and costumes that looks like an early 80's parody over something in between Plan 9 From Outer Space and Flash Gordon, it's more than enough to make it difficult whether if one should laugh or cry, or simply get disillusioned.

The conclusion is that Wenders was declared a genius at the time and that he also had some more or less fanatic fans in the jury at the Venice Film Festival. Yes, he was odd and different, but that alone does not make this film brilliant. It says more about the state of minds of the director and the members of the jury mentioned. It's absolutely not interesting.

This is one movie I've enjoyed seeing over and over.It's one of my all time favorite. The story is pretty simple; A filmmaker runs out of money while shooting in Portugal. He goes looking for his producer in Los Angeles to find out what is going on. This one of the most beautifully shot movie in black and white I've seen and it helps to set the overall atmosphere of the film. The cast is great and the story flows right along. Apart from a few lenghty scenes (wich is why I gave it a 9), you won't be disappointed.If you're interested at all about movie making don't miss this one.

Not only is this film a classic - the short ends became Stranger Than Paradise making this film a true two-fer.

A very anti-Hollywood film structured first as a kind of meditation and then turning into a great faux whodunit indictment of Hollywood itself. This won't make a lot of sense until you actually see the film - but see it you must if you are a true film afficianado. Ignore the ridiculous film geek influenced 7.3 rating - the actual rating of 7.7 is much more accurate. One of the films that made Wim Wenders great.

This film was shot by Wenders while he was waiting for Coppola to get the financing to complete Hammett and his frustrations with that experience are clearly expressed here. It is a very personal film and, as such, I think one of his best. The end sequence in LA is classic. Shot in beautiful black and white, this is really a must see for any fan of the 'art film' in general and of Wenders' work in particular.

Did someone find the plot somewhere in the film?. Perhaps it is the thing missing in this pretentious exercise of cinema about cinema. It is quite surprising that Gordon says that "A movie without a plot is nothing"... It is possible that characters have more to say that the own Wim Wenders. Was this phrase in the original plot or the actor decided to send a hint to the director?.

This movie is probably one of the best movies of the early 80's.

A simple story: the beginning is enigmatically, the dessert?, the space? a lonely and a dead world and people who are trying to survive in a terrible weather, but they are just making a movie in Portugal, then the concepts of money and economics and "the life goes on" appears.

Wenders makes a journey into reality, and this is cruel. The journey from fiction to reality is long and atmospheric. It ends in LA with an assassination. The interior monologues of the actors and the static of each scene is definitively material to be study by every cinematographic student.

I saw this film when I was in mid-20s in 1982. I viewed this film with Stanley Brock in Santa Monica, California. Stanley Brock was in the Actors Studio with one of the actors from "State of Things" - Allen Garfield. I have not seen the film again, but if I see it in the video store, I will rent it.

The eerie black and white photography of the Portugal coastline creates the loneliness of the actors. I love that image of the coastline even 20 years later.

I do remember Allen Garfield and Paul Getty in this film.

Please see this film if you have the chance.

The film is slow, but very nice, because really shows life as it is. It talks about a director who shoots a movie without knowing that its budget will be cut off. Once he embarks on a journey to the U.S., where his film has been funded, he sank into the muddy waters of the life of his sponsor. The action in the film gradually speeds up and it is not very surprising.

The music is also very good. Throughout the movie repeats the same theme, which is quite strange. Finally, however, it develops and displays all its importance... In the end is time for the real action.

You have to watch this movie!

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Time has passed since i watched this wonderful movie, and it remains in my mind like those dreams you remember for ever although had lasted ten, twenty, thirty years, like a child's dream. In effect ever i though this film was made as Wenders wanted to built an feverish dream, the American night, in a gorgeous black and white, the scene the crew is filming with that children dying and screaming like an hurt animal, and the self image that Friederich receive in an old printer from the screenwriter. Do you remember those old movies of 60's made in the Nuevo Mexico desert? Those movies made in a high percentage in a false night that you could feel the heath of a warm wind?. Longer, the best Wenders'film.