A day with Wim Wenders at Il Cinema Ritrovato: the filmmaker will be at Cineteca di Bologna’s festival tomorrow, Thursday 25 June, to present his graduation film Summer in the City, made between 1969 and 1971 (4:30 pm, Cinema Modernissimo), and later meet the audience in a conversation (7:00 pm, also at Cinema Modernissimo).

The day at the festival will actually begin in the morning, at 11:00 am at Cinema Arlecchino, where Wenders will introduce a screening of Fritz Lang’s 1952 classic Clash by Night. A film both renowned and rarely screened, Summer in the City was, as Wenders recalled a few years after its completion, “truly a very, very low-budget film. We had twelve thousand Deutschmarks, which at the time amounted to four or five thousand dollars, and we managed to make a two-and-a-half-hour film, shot in 16mm, in black and white, with direct sound, starring Hanns Zischler. I also have a small part in it. I’m one of the friends Hanns meets in Munich: we play billiards and he asks me what I’ve been doing for the past two years. I reply that I’ve been in America.

“In fact, my first trip to New York coincided with a festival screening of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. The scene was more fiction than reality. Today, I really see Summer in the City as a documentary about the end of the 1960s; it is closer to a documentary than any of my other films. It is a fiction film, certainly, but its length, the black-and-white cinematography, the wide-angle lens and the static shots make it feel more like a documentary about the ideas people had in 1969 and 1970, and about the way they felt. An immense disappointment, and a dreamlike sense of total powerlessness: that is what I see in the film now.”