NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art celebrates filmmaker Wim Wenders (German, b. 1945) with a major career retrospective. This series is a cooperative venture with the Berlin International Film Festivalwhich dedicates its 2015 Homage to Wenders, presenting him with an Honorary Golden Bear award for lifetime achievementand Deutsche KinemathekMuseum for Film und Fernsehen.
MoMAs retrospective of 21 feature films and numerous shorts captures the breadth of Wenderss career, from his 16mm experimental works of the late 1960sincluding Same Player Shoots Again (1968) and Silver City (1969)to the New York premiere of his most recent film, The Salt of the Earth (2014). This documentary profile of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado won the Un Certain Regard Special Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and will be commercially released by Sony Pictures Classics on March 27, 2015.
Also presented are new digital restorations of some of Wenderss most cherished fiction and nonfiction films: The Goalkeepers Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972); Alice in the Cities (1974); The American Friend (1977); Paris, Texas (1984); Tokyo-Ga (1985); Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989); and the North American premiere of the full-length directors cut of Until the End of the World (1991). The retrospective culminates with Wenderss vibrant documentaries about music, dance, and filmmaking: Lightning over Water (1980), Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995), Buena Vista Social Club (1999), The Soul of a Man (2003), and Pina (2011).
Wenders will introduce many of the screenings, and will also take part in an onstage conversation with his longtime collaborator Peter Handke, the Austrian author who coscripted 3 American LPs (1969), The Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1972), False Move (1975), and Wings of Desire (1987), in a conversation moderated by Ian Buruma, whose latest book of essays is Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War (The New York Review of Books, 2014). The retrospective also premieres a new digital restoration of The Left-Handed Woman (1978), which Handke directed from his own novel and Wenders produced. IFC Center, with Janus Films, will present a selection of Wenders films in theatrical runs in Fall 2015.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Thomas Beard, independent curator.