Paris, Texas (film)
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| Paris, Texas | |
|---|---|
 1984 original film poster |
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| Directed by | Wim Wenders |
| Produced by | Chris Sievernich, Don Guest, Pascale Dauman, Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | L.M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard |
| Starring | Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, Hunter Carson |
| Music by | Ry Cooder |
| Cinematography | Robby Müller |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) |  19 May 1984 (Cannes premiere) 19 September 1984 9 November 1984 11 January 1985 |
| Running time | 147 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Paris, Texas is a 1984 film directed by Wim Wenders. It is probably his best-known and most critically acclaimed work in the English speaking world. The screenplay is by L.M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard, and the distinctive musical score was composed by Ry Cooder. The cinematography is by Robby Muller.
The film stars Harry Dean Stanton as Travis, an amnesiac who has been lost for four years and is taken in by his brother (played by Dean Stockwell). He later tries to put his life back together and understand what happened between him, his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski), and his son Hunter (Hunter Carson).
The film was a co-production between companies in France and West Germany, but was filmed in the United States.
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[edit] Title
The film is named after the Texas town of Paris, but no footage was shot there. Instead, Paris is referred to as the location of a vacant lot owned by Travis that is seen in a photograph.
The photograph shows a desert landscape, but in fact the real Paris rests on the edge of the forests of East Texas, far from any desert.
[edit] Style
Paris, Texas is notable for its stunning images of the Texan landscape. The first shot is a bird's eye-view of the desert, a bleak, dry, alien landscape. A hawk lands on a boulder. A man walking alone in the desert stops and looks. He is wearing a cheap Mexican suit, a red baseball cap, has several days of stubble, and his ankles are bandaged. He staggers, lost and alone. His clothes are covered in dust and damp with sweat. Shots follow of old advertisement billboards, placards, graffiti, rusty iron carcasses, old railway lines, neon signs, motels, seemingly never-ending roads, and Los Angeles, finally culminating in some famous scenes shot outside a drive-through bank in down-town Houston. The cinematography is typical of Robby Muller's work,[citation needed] a long-time collaborator of Wim Wenders.
The haunting slide-guitar sound-track by Ry Cooder, based on Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground", echoes the scenery and the mood.[citation needed]
[edit] Themes
A central theme in the film is social alienation in America.[citation needed] The Texan scenery (both the vastness of the landscape on the road and the architecture in the then booming Houston) reflects this theme. Another recurring theme is parents who use their child as a pretext to be able to stay with their partner.
[edit] Responses
The film has a critical and cult following[citation needed] and it won the 1984 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival.
[edit] In popular culture
- Irish pop-rock group U2 cite Paris, Texas as an inspiration for their album The Joshua Tree.[citation needed]
- Scottish rock group, Primal Scream, sampled Nastassja Kinski in the film for use on their critically acclaimed album Screamadelica.
- Both Kurt Cobain [1] and Elliott Smith[citation needed] mentioned this film as one of their favorite movies of all time.
- Brooklyn-based band Nada Surf mentions the movie in their song "Comes a Time" from the album The Weight Is a Gift.
- The last track of Gotan Project's second album Lunático is a cover of Ry Cooder's theme song for the film.
- Scottish group Texas was named based on the film.
- The band Travis is named after the main character of this movie.
- Video game developer Goichi Suda named it his favorite movie in an IGN interview[2].
- Australian band, Cog, have a song called Paris, Texas.
- Francois Bovon was influenced to write Luke the Theologian after he saw Paris, Texas.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by The Ballad of Narayama |
Palme d'Or 1984 |
Succeeded by When Father Was Away on Business |
