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Paris, Texas (40th Anniversary 4K Restoration)
September 1, 2024 @ 1:15 pm – 3:45 pm EDT
New German Cinema pioneer Wim Wenders (WINGS OF DESIRE) brings his keen eye for landscape to the American Southwest in PARIS, TEXAS, a profoundly moving character study written by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sam Shepard. Paris, Texas follows the mysterious, nearly mute drifter Travis (a magnificent Harry Dean Stanton, whose face is a landscape all its own) as he tries to reconnect with his young son, living with his brother (Dean Stockwell) in Los Angeles, and his missing wife (Nastassja Kinski). From this simple setup, Wenders and Shepard produce a powerful statement on codes of masculinity and the myth of the American family, as well as an exquisite visual exploration of a vast, crumbling world of canyons and neon.
Director: Wim Wenders
Writer: L.M. Kit Carson | Sam Shepard | Walter Donohue
Starring: Harry Dean Stanton | Nastassja Kinski | Dean Stockwell
Cinematographer: Robby Müller
Music by: Ry Cooder
1984 | 147 mins | R | France | Color | Drama, Repertory
Screening in Theater #1:
TFF Artistic Director, Steve Dollar, on Win Wenders
Read below…
Other Perspectives
From an interview with Wim Wenders in 2016
In 2016, Tallahassee Film Festival artistic director Steve Dollar spoke with Wim Wenders for a Washington Post article timed to a retrospective of the German director’s films at the American Film institute. The conversation included some recollections from the production of Paris, Texas, the 1984 drama that plays on the Challenger Learning Center’s IMAX screen Sept. 1, as our festival centerpiece, marking its 40th anniversary with a new digital restoration overseen by the Wim Wenders Foundation. A tale of tortured souls, lost love, and the promise of a redemption beyond the far edge of the desert horizon, the film touches on some eternal, existential themes, given flesh by its essential cast and cinematic grandeur by DP Robby Muller.
The grizzled character actor Harry Dean Stanton found a new stature as Travis, a seeming amnesiac on a mission to reunite with the wife (Nastassja Kinski) and child he left behind. The film’s closing scenes have an emotional resonance that makes them much-beloved in Wenders’s work.
Wenders: During the shooting of the film, you rarely think you’re doing something that’s going to be successful. You’re so busy doing it and we had so many problems. We ran out of money. We ran out of script. It was only when we shot the last few scenes, when Travis meets Nastassja Kinski in this funky peep show, that it dawned on me that we were going to touch people in a big way. I was a little scared by the idea.
It was ambitious, because these scenes Sam Shepard had written almost like two one-act plays. We treated it like that. We shot it always as a whole. The last scene is 20 minutes long and that’s the maximum length of the film stock. We always started from scratch. If I or any of the actors [screwed] up, then we would begin again. We had to always do it from A to Z.
Harry Dean Stanton seems to erase any distance between himself and Travis.
Wenders: Harry invested his entire life in the part. It’s the first time he did a leading part after hundreds of supporting parts. It’s almost a little tragic. It’s almost a little late for him to become a romantic leading man. It was his anxiety through the film that he was too old. Every night, he had the same question to me: “Look at Nastassja, how beautiful she is. Don’t you think I’m too old for her?” I always assured him. But he was scared until the very last day. Even when we went to Cannes, he thought he couldn’t possibly go to Cannes. I finally said to him, “Well, Harry, it is your one chance. Why don’t you get yourself an assistant and you bring somebody with you so you don’t have to worry about logistics and the tuxedo. Get somebody who can be there for you and hold your hand.” He said, “Okay, that’s a good idea.” He brought a young man to Cannes who was with Harry selflessly every day, brought him coffee and held his hand. And that young man was Sean Penn.