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QUESTION: You think all parents are Hollywood?
WENDERS: Yes . . . of course . . . even in films I really admire . . . I get claustrophobic because they all tend to impose these structures of father and mother; they all build up those same patterns of domination.1
If Hollywood has spawned its share of native sons, it has few who have seen their father's nakedness - and fewer still who would use his language to broadcast the revelation. For the directors of the New German Cinema, their inheritance is complicated by an awareness that many of the masters who shaped Hollywood - Pabst, Murnau, Lubitsch, Wilder and Lang - were German, and further muddied by a second American invasion following the Allied Occupation. Hollywood singlehandedly brought the tottering German film industry to its knees and then inundated German cinemas with its glittering fare. And in the amnesiac vacuum created by collective desire to forget the past, Hollywood and its icons of American culture took hold. Young German filmmakers were weaned on Hollywood, yet, when the time arrived for each to make his first feature, most discovered that they were not American directors, and, further - as Wim Wenders noted - that
it was possible to be colonised, or imperisalised, in such a way that you really accepted the language . . . that . . . there is no other film language than . . . one made in America. . . .2
Attempts to subvert this pattern of domination by forging alternatives to classical Hollywood conventions, however, met with little domestic financial or critical success when filmmakers failed to duplicate the fluency of its images.3
Under these conditions, it is hardly surprising that Wenders would attempt a film in one of the most American of film genres - the suspense, or "thriller" film - and one largely reminiscent of the most frequently screened of any film made by one of its masters: Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. It would be simplistic, nonetheless, to assert that Wenders chose to work under the shadow of Hitchcock merely to point up the deceptions beneath the surface of the genre and of Hollywood cinema. In many respects , Wenders 's The American Friend extends several...