Der Stand der Dinge

Der Stand der Dinge (released in English as The State of Things) is a 1982 black-and-white feature film directed by Wim Wenders about a film crew stranded in Portugal when its financing collapses. It belongs to the self-reflexive strand of the New German Cinema that takes filmmaking itself as its subject, and it won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the 1982 Venice Film Festival.¹

Origin in the Hammett production

The film grew directly out of Wenders' own Hollywood experience. After the international success of Der Amerikanische Freund (1977), Francis Coppola and Fred Roos invited Wenders to Los Angeles to adapt Joe Gores' novel Hammett. Production began in 1978 but became mired in rewrites, cast changes, and halts in filming; after a falling-out with Coppola, the shoot stretched over five years of repeated interruptions.^{6 • 1}

During one of these forced pauses Wenders fled to Portugal, where his friend, the actress Isabelle Weingarten, was working on Raúl Ruiz's The Territory (1981), a production that also had money problems. Wenders helped complete that film and, in a stay of about two weeks, worked out the script for Der Stand der Dinge.^{6 • 1} Wenders described the result as "a sum of my work and the reasons that led me to Hollywood... it's about taking stock of things," and called it the darkest film he had made up to then.^{5 • 1}

Cast and crew

Patrick Bauchau plays the director Friedrich "Fritz" Munro, a name that alludes to the silent-film director F. W. Murnau. Samuel Fuller, the American director of B pictures, appears as the cameraman Joe Corby; John Paul Getty III plays the screenwriter Dennis; Isabelle Weingarten plays Anna and Viva Auder the script girl Kate. Allen Garfield plays the producer Gordon, credited in some sources as Allen Goorwitz, and Roger Corman appears as a lawyer.^{1 • 7}

Behind the camera, the cinematography is credited to Henri Alekan, Fred Murphy, and Martin Schäfer, the editing to Barbara von Weitershausen and Peter Przygodda, and the music to Jürgen Knieper, with songs by Joe Ely, David Blue, X, and The Del Byzanteens among others.^{2 • 3} The production companies were Road Movies Filmproduktion and Wim Wenders Produktion in Berlin, Pro-ject Filmproduktion in Munich, and ZDF in Mainz, in cooperation with Pari Films (Paris), Musidora (Madrid), Gray City Inc. (New York), and V. O. Filmes (Lisbon).¹

Reception and interpretation

The film premiered on 4 September 1982 at the Venice Film Festival, where it received the Golden Lion for Best Film. After the German premiere at the International Hofer Filmtage on 27 October 1982 and the theatrical release two days later, it won the 1983 German Film Award in the categories Best Feature Film and Best Camerawork.¹ Contemporary press coverage in Die Zeit described it as an autobiographically inspired settling of accounts with a system that manufactures dreams as standardized industrial goods while destroying the more personal dreams of filmmakers.⁸

Scholarly readings have emphasized the film's position at a historical juncture: the end of the European new waves and new cinemas on one side, and Hollywood's move into a self-styled postmodern era of self-reflexive remakes on the other. One study describes the film as a mise-en-abyme (a work mirroring itself inside itself, like nested stories) construction of self-referentiality and self-negation.⁹ Gilles Deleuze discusses the film in Cinema 2, citing Wenders' precept that "the film will be finished when there is no more money left" and reading its ending, in which the producer on the run is murdered and the filmmaker dies with him, as showing that there is no equivalence in the mutual camera-money exchange: "time is money."¹⁰

The film also anticipates motifs Wenders returned to later: an homage to Lisbon that he developed fully in Lisbon Story, and the BMW Isetta that appears on the Portuguese beach here and reappears in that later film.¹

Home video and restoration

The Wenders Stiftung lists a 4K restoration from 2015, distributed as a 4K DCP.² In Germany, ARTHAUS has issued the film on Blu-ray and DVD in a Special Edition and a Digital Remastered edition, both with a Wenders audio commentary, deleted scenes, a trailer, an interview of Wenders by Roger Willemsen, and a booklet.¹¹

References

1. Der Stand der Dinge, filmportal.de
2. The State of Things press sheet, Wim Wenders Stiftung
3. The State of Things, AFI Catalog
4. The State of Things, Janus Films
5. Der Stand der Dinge film card, 25th Torino Film Festival
6. Lee Hill, "The State of Things," Senses of Cinema, April 2009
7. Der Stand der Dinge, TV Wunschliste
8. "Der 'Goldene Löwe' für Wenders: ein Zeichen gegen Hollywood?," Die Zeit 38/1982
9. "The Death of (a) Cinema: The State of Things," Amsterdam University Press
10. Hester Baer, German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism, University of Maryland
11. Der Stand der Dinge, ARTHAUS

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 1980s › Released 1980 to 1985

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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