Paris, Texas (1984)

[OutOfBoose]

Wow, wow, wow! The restoration pics look amazing. I hope there's a re-release. I was disappointed in Criterion one. The movie can look a lot better.

[starman15317]

I really want to get both this and Wings of Desire, but I can't help but wonder if they will rerelease them with the new 4K transfer.

[joie]

They don't seem inclined to rerelease Blu-rays. "Beauty and the Beast," "The Leopard," "8 1/2?" and possibly others have had new scans and/or restorations since their releases and have not been upgraded. The cynic in me thinks that if the current releases had do-overs, then how could the previous release have been "definitive," "the best it can look," etc.?

[jlk5844]

Originally Posted by joie

They don't seem inclined to rerelease Blu-rays. "Beauty and the Beast," "The Leopard," "8 1/2?" and possibly others have had new scans and/or restorations since their releases and have not been upgraded. The cynic in me thinks that if the current releases had do-overs, then how could the previous release have been "definitive," "the best it can look," etc.?

Yeah that's the unfortunate thing about Criterion, they're stubborn about rereleasing something that's been improved elsewhere. But then, they're not alone in that regard. I've heard of The Leopard getting a new restoration but wasn't aware of the other two. Are these three restorations available on Blu-ray and English friendly?

[ShellOilJunior]

Originally Posted by starman15317

I really want to get both this and Wings of Desire, but I can't help but wonder if they will rerelease them with the new 4K transfer.

I think there's a chance if Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire are boxed up with some new Wenders on blu-ray. Playtime did get a re-release but only as part of the Tati box.

[starman15317]

Originally Posted by ShellOilJunior

I think there's a chance if Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire are boxed up with some new Wenders on blu-ray. Playtime did get a re-release but only as part of the Tati box.

Playtime was remastered for the Tati set, correct?

[ShellOilJunior]

Originally Posted by starman15317

Playtime was remastered for the Tati set, correct?

Yes.

First release: "35mm reduction internegative made from the restored 65mm interpositive."

2nd release: "sourced from a new 4K restoration scanned from the original 65mm negative"

[Ray Jackson]

I watched this again last night after first seeing it two years ago and not liking it at all.

I honestly don't know what I was thinking.

It's great.

...so glad I decided to give it a second chance.

[OutOfBoose]

^Really great film. I decided to watch it for Nastassja, but stayed for a great movie. One of my favorite road movies ever, if not favorite.

[The Great Owl]

Sometimes, you have to put your stack of still-unwatched Blu-rays aside and revisit a favorite. I'm participating one of those Facebook “Post one favorite movie a day for 10 days” trends right now, and this one came to mind, so I decided to watch it yet again.



Travis, a scraggly drifter played by Harry Dean Stanton, walks out of a southwestern desert, dressed in a red baseball cap, a dust-covered suit, a tie, and tattered shoes. He enters a ramshackle saloon, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground. Travis's brother, played by Dean Stockwell, drives from Los Angeles to retrieve his disheveled sibling, only to find that Travis, who simply stares silently and unresponsively with haunted eyes into the horizon, has no explanation for why he has been missing for the past four years.

Upon being brought to Los Angeles and finding out that Hunter, his seven year-old son, has been taken in by his brother and his sister-in-law after having been abandoned years ago by his estranged wife, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, Travis gradually earns the trust of the boy while staying with the family and studying old photographs and Super 8 film footage with a grief-stricken fascination. When he decides to travel to Houston in order to find Jane, his choices in the days that follow change the lives of everyone involved.

The title of the 1984 Wim Wenders film, Paris, Texas, evokes a sense of cognitive dissonance, because, even though the town is an actual place, our minds instinctively grapple with images and perceptions of two disparate locations on different continents. This off-kilter aesthetic permeates every aspect of the movie. Early in the story, we are introduced to a German doctor who resides in rural Texas. Travis's brother, Walt, as portrayed by Stockwell, comes across as an all-American everyman, but he is married to an exotic French woman, played wonderfully by Aurore Clément. A scene with Travis polishing and lining up the family's shoes resembles an image from a Yasujirō Ozu Japanese film, and it stands out in contrast to the wide open spaces of the American west and the slide guitar music score by Ry Cooder. Much of this movie deals with travel, and the night scenes of characters stopping by lonely roadside diners, phone booths, and city buildings are bathed in a green neon glow. Wenders, a German director, showcases Americana landscapes with a genuine sense of awe, but certain ingredients feel out of place, and not a moment passes by when we do not realize that we are observing an outsider's idea of this country.

I first saw Paris, Texas roughly a decade ago, long after the 1980s had passed, and my primary reaction was one of gleeful nostalgia for the era captured by the movie, an era when the sight of children riding in the beds of pickup trucks on busy highways was commonplace, when walkie-talkies seemed like cutting edge technology, when two people could communicate with walkie-talkies while stationed at opposite sides of a metropolitan bank and not be arrested within minutes by suspicious policemen, and when billboards that hover over the highways were created with a hands-on artistic attention to detail. With each subsequent viewing, however, I grew to love how the film immerses us in the stories of Stanton's Travis and Kinski's Jane without passing judgment on their behavior or life decisions. The narrative provides multiple callbacks to John Ford's iconic 1956 western, The Searchers, which also dealt with an antihero who returns a child to a home before retreating alone into the unknown, but Wenders is more concerned simply with allowing us to gaze at length into the lives of lost souls. The opening shots show Travis as a tiny figure in the middle of a vast open desert under the sun, but revelations and heartbreak draw us in until we finally observe him up close in a darkened room as he speaks with Jane from the other side of a one-way mirror.

When Harry Dean Stanton passed away in 2017 at the age of 91, I posted on Facebook that the world had become a significantly less cool place. I've always loved how his roles always seemed particularly tailored to his appearance, which could best be described as lean, beleaguered, and world-weary, but ultimately affable. His role as a blue-collar spaceship laborer in Alien, his role as Molly Ringwald's father in Pretty in Pink, his fantastic part as Bud in Repo Man, his hitchhiker scenes in Two-Lane Blacktop, his moments as an ill-fated father in the original Red Dawn, and even his cameo in The Avengers all exuded a comfortably "lived-in" appearance, almost like an unkempt mechanic who has been working at the same car shop down the street for 40 years, but who always has a pleasant spark in his eye. Paris, Texas is Stanton at his best, though. Although he does not utter a word for the first half hour of this movie, he conveys so much with mannerisms and mournful expressions. Even late in the film, when he gives an extended monologue of sorts, a sense of nuanced mystery rules all, and we find out just enough about his character to spark our curiosity and imagination.

Nastassja Kinski, who captured my childhood heart with her role in the 1982 horror remake, Cat People, is one of cinema's great beauties, and, in this film, her appearance benefits from a delayed buildup, in the style of Harry Lime in The Third Man, where her Jane character is introduced to us by way of multiple scenes of other people talking about her before she is finally seen in a crude sunlit Super 8 video. When Jane finally does show up in person in all her lovely blonde glory in the seedy sex club establishment, however, she is depicted in an uncannily low-key way almost in the background while the camera fixates primarily on Travis and his reactions as he is talking to her by telephone inside a peep show booth. The ensuing conversation is one of my absolute favorite character dialogue interactions, as Travis and Jane speak to each other from opposite sides of the mirror, with her bathed in light and him enshrouded in darkness, as if to accentuate the tragic emotional gulf between them that will never again be bridged. Jane's body language and her first signs of recognition when she realizes that she is talking to her old lover are for the ages.

At the end of Paris, Texas, I always want so much more. I want to know the backstory of how the middle-aged Travis met and fell in love with the younger Jane. I want to know what eventually became of the son, Hunter, played by Hunter Carson in a brilliant child actor portrayal, after the final events shown on screen. I want to know if Hunter ever saw his old family again later on. I want to know how Stockwell's Walt first met his French wife. I want to know everything that happened between the idyllic Super 8 vacation footage of the five main characters and Travis's emergence from the desert. In the end, though, all that I have is the blend of joy and sorrow, as dissimilar as the two locations that come to mind from the movie title, as a tearful character drives alone into the night, understanding that, while the fractured pieces of something once beautiful can never be put together again, hope may still be salvaged from the ruins.

Paris, Texas is a tremendous and visually spectacular motion picture that holds more hypnotic power over me with each viewing.

[ZeTi]

There are like a handful of movies i'd consider perfect, this is one of them.

[Richard--W]

Originally Posted by The Great Owl

Sometimes, you have to put your stack of still-unwatched Blu-rays aside and revisit a favorite. I'm participating one of those Facebook “Post one favorite movie a day for 10 days” trends right now, and this one came to mind, so I decided to watch it yet again.



Travis, a scraggly drifter played by Harry Dean Stanton, walks out of a southwestern desert, dressed in a red baseball cap, a dust-covered suit, a tie, and tattered shoes. He enters a ramshackle saloon, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground. Travis's brother, played by Dean Stockwell, drives from Los Angeles to retrieve his disheveled sibling, only to find that Travis, who simply stares silently and unresponsively with haunted eyes into the horizon, has no explanation for why he has been missing for the past four years.

Upon being brought to Los Angeles and finding out that Hunter, his seven year-old son, has been taken in by his brother and his sister-in-law after having been abandoned years ago by his estranged wife, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, Travis gradually earns the trust of the boy while staying with the family and studying old photographs and Super 8 film footage with a grief-stricken fascination. When he decides to travel to Houston in order to find Jane, his choices in the days that follow change the lives of everyone involved.

The title of the 1984 Wim Wenders film, Paris, Texas, evokes a sense of cognitive dissonance, because, even though the town is an actual place, our minds instinctively grapple with images and perceptions of two disparate locations on different continents. This off-kilter aesthetic permeates every aspect of the movie. Early in the story, we are introduced to a German doctor who resides in rural Texas. Travis's brother, Walt, as portrayed by Stockwell, comes across as an all-American everyman, but he is married to an exotic French woman, played wonderfully by Aurore Clément. A scene with Travis polishing and lining up the family's shoes resembles an image from a Yasujirō Ozu Japanese film, and it stands out in contrast to the wide open spaces of the American west and the slide guitar music score by Ry Cooder. Much of this movie deals with travel, and the night scenes of characters stopping by lonely roadside diners, phone booths, and city buildings are bathed in a green neon glow. Wenders, a German director, showcases Americana landscapes with a genuine sense of awe, but certain ingredients feel out of place, and not a moment passes by when we do not realize that we are observing an outsider's idea of this country.

I first saw Paris, Texas roughly a decade ago, long after the 1980s had passed, and my primary reaction was one of gleeful nostalgia for the era captured by the movie, an era when the sight of children riding in the beds of pickup trucks on busy highways was commonplace, when walkie-talkies seemed like cutting edge technology, when two people could communicate with walkie-talkies while stationed at opposite sides of a metropolitan bank and not be arrested within minutes by suspicious policemen, and when billboards that hover over the highways were created with a hands-on artistic attention to detail. With each subsequent viewing, however, I grew to love how the film immerses us in the stories of Stanton's Travis and Kinski's Jane without passing judgment on their behavior or life decisions. The narrative provides multiple callbacks to John Ford's iconic 1956 western, The Searchers, which also dealt with an antihero who returns a child to a home before retreating alone into the unknown, but Wenders is more concerned simply with allowing us to gaze at length into the lives of lost souls. The opening shots show Travis as a tiny figure in the middle of a vast open desert under the sun, but revelations and heartbreak draw us in until we finally observe him up close in a darkened room as he speaks with Jane from the other side of a one-way mirror.

When Harry Dean Stanton passed away in 2017 at the age of 91, I posted on Facebook that the world had become a significantly less cool place. I've always loved how his roles always seemed particularly tailored to his appearance, which could best be described as lean, beleaguered, and world-weary, but ultimately affable. His role as a blue-collar spaceship laborer in Alien, his role as Molly Ringwald's father in Pretty in Pink, his fantastic part as Bud in Repo Man, his hitchhiker scenes in Two-Lane Blacktop, his moments as an ill-fated father in the original Red Dawn, and even his cameo in The Avengers all exuded a comfortably "lived-in" appearance, almost like an unkempt mechanic who has been working at the same car shop down the street for 40 years, but who always has a pleasant spark in his eye. Paris, Texas is Stanton at his best, though. Although he does not utter a word for the first half hour of this movie, he conveys so much with mannerisms and mournful expressions. Even late in the film, when he gives an extended monologue of sorts, a sense of nuanced mystery rules all, and we find out just enough about his character to spark our curiosity and imagination.

Nastassja Kinski, who captured my childhood heart with her role in the 1982 horror remake, Cat People, is one of cinema's great beauties, and, in this film, her appearance benefits from a delayed buildup, in the style of Harry Lime in The Third Man, where her Jane character is introduced to us by way of multiple scenes of other people talking about her before she is finally seen in a crude sunlit Super 8 video. When Jane finally does show up in person in all her lovely blonde glory in the seedy sex club establishment, however, she is depicted in an uncannily low-key way almost in the background while the camera fixates primarily on Travis and his reactions as he is talking to her by telephone inside a peep show booth. The ensuing conversation is one of my absolute favorite character dialogue interactions, as Travis and Jane speak to each other from opposite sides of the mirror, with her bathed in light and him enshrouded in darkness, as if to accentuate the tragic emotional gulf between them that will never again be bridged. Jane's body language and her first signs of recognition when she realizes that she is talking to her old lover are for the ages.

At the end of Paris, Texas, I always want so much more. I want to know the backstory of how the middle-aged Travis met and fell in love with the younger Jane. I want to know what eventually became of the son, Hunter, played by Hunter Carson in a brilliant child actor portrayal, after the final events shown on screen. I want to know if Hunter ever saw his old family again later on. I want to know how Stockwell's Walt first met his French wife. I want to know everything that happened between the idyllic Super 8 vacation footage of the five main characters and Travis's emergence from the desert. In the end, though, all that I have is the blend of joy and sorrow, as dissimilar as the two locations that come to mind from the movie title, as a tearful character drives alone into the night, understanding that, while the fractured pieces of something once beautiful can never be put together again, hope may still be salvaged from the ruins.

Paris, Texas is a tremendous and visually spectacular motion picture that holds more hypnotic power over me with each viewing.

Astute review. Well writ. Reflects my own thoughts. I haven't seen Paris, Texas in awhile, but I recently bought the Criterion bluray so I'll be putting myself through it again. It packs an emotional wallop, this film.

I remember reading somewhere in the interviews or promotional material Sam Shepard let it slip that his inspiration for writing Paris, Texas was "Tangled Up In Blue" a Bob Dylan song on the album Blood On the Tracks, recorded in September 1974 and released early 1975. Shepard hung out with Dylan and toured with him when the album was being performed live. If you know "Tangled Up In Blue" and the other songs on the album you'll begin to find subtle resemblances, and some not so subtle.

[badfingerboogie]

Beautiful film - a gorgeous experience unlike any other.

[OutOfBoose]

I really want to watch this film again, but I'll wait for a new master (I hope it arrives one day).

[JohnCarpenterFan]

Originally Posted by OutOfBoose

I really want to watch this film again, but I'll wait for a new master (I hope it arrives one day).

Careful what you wish for, this film was newly "restored" by both Ritrovata and Eclair.

[OutOfBoose]

Originally Posted by JohnCarpenterFan

Careful what you wish for, this film was newly "restored" by both Ritrovata and Eclair.

I saw the screens. It looks more yellow, but not distractingly so.

[Richard--W]

In a film loaded with memorable shots, I remember that scene at the billboard where Travis is on the ground looking up at his brother Walt, so well played by Dean Stockwell. Magic-hour light splashes on the ground and the brown haze of pollution hovers in the sky. The street stretches out before them into the infinity of an endless suburb. It just goes on and on into the distance with buildings on either side lighting up for the nighttime. I also like how neon signs add to the atmosphere, a motif in Wenders and Muller's work together. Magic hour light and neon light, neon light and magic hour light. Paris Texas is beautifully photographed but it's always tactile and never pretty.

Billboards, neon, freeways, intersections, and roads that go on forever are the images that linger in the mind after watching this film.

Does anyone think that the young wife played by Nastassja Kinski might not be telling the truth about her job in the cubicle? What sense does it make for men to pay to see her if she's not naked?

I think Walt Henderson is the best role Dean Stockwell ever had in a long career. He's a good brother to Travis.

By the way Harry Dean Stanton steals every scenes he's in in The Missouri Breaks (1976) and especially in Straight Time (1978).

[The Great Owl]

Originally Posted by Richard--W

Does anyone think that the young wife played by Nastassja Kinski might not be telling the truth about her job in the cubicle? What sense does it make for men to pay to see her if she's not naked.

Jane merely specifies that she does not have outside relations with any of the customers, meaning that she does not go home with any of them. She’s likely telling the truth. It’s pretty obvious that she strips for men inside the peep show booth, though. She even starts to take off her pink sweater during the first booth scene, but Travis asks her to leave it on.

[Richard--W]

Originally Posted by The Great Owl

Jane merely specifies that she does not have outside relations with any of the customers, meaning that she does not go home with any of them. She’s likely telling the truth. It’s pretty obvious that she strips for men inside the peep show booth, though. She even starts to take off her pink sweater during the first booth scene, but Travis asks her to leave it on.

Oh that's right. It's been awhile since I've seen it. I'll watching it again in a day or two.

[Richard--W]

No Anglais? That's uncivilized. To hell with it then.